LIBRARY 

OF  THE 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA. 

V  svt  £ '  " 

0*5 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF     EMERSON 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 
EMERSON 

BY    F.   B.   SANBORN 


T       OF  TH 

uwiv 

OF 


BOSTON 
CHARLES     E.    GOODSPEED 

1903 


Copyright,  1903,  by  F.  B.  SANBORN 


D.  B.  Updike,  The  Merry  mount  Press,  Boston 


PREFATORY  NOTE 

HAVING  determined  to  write  a  series  of  volumes 
describing  the  personal  traits  of  four  distin 
guished  authors  whom  I  intimately  knew, — Em 
erson,  Thoreau,  Ellery  Channing,  and  Bronson 
Alcott, — /  offer  this  volume  as  the  second.  So 
close  were  the  relations  of  these  friends,  that  men 
tion  of  all  is  naturally  made  in  each  book,  involv 
ing  some  repetition.  From  these  books,  illustrated 
with  portraits,  a  good  conception  is  had  of  the 
Concord  school  of  poets  and  philosophers,  who 
were  so  distinctly  original. 

A  part  of  the  plan  was  to  give  in  each  book  the 
best  portrait,  with  a  facsimile  of  manuscript.  The 
portrait  of  Thoreau  did  not  appear  in  "  The 
Personality  of  Thoreau"  but  was  reserved  for 
Channing  s  life.  Emerson  s  portrait  here  given 
was  painted  by  David  Scott  at  Edinburgh  in 
1848,  but  reached  America  thirty  years  later,  and 
was  never  well  engraved  before.  In  some  respects 

it  is  the  best  of  many  portraits. 

F.  B.  S. 

CONCORD,  February  14,  1903. 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF     EMERSON 


THE    PERSONALITY    OF 
EMERSON 

IN  writing  of  my  comparatively  short  acquaint 
ance  with  Henry  Thoreau,  I  was  easily  able  to  re 
call  the  circumstances  under  which  I  first  became 
acquainted,  not  only  with  his  person,  but  with  his 
mind.  It  was  not  so  in  my  relations  with  Emer 
son  ;  for  so  early  did  I  begin  to  read  his  writings, 
that  I  can  hardly  remember  when  I  did  not  know 
them,  at  least  superficially.  A  natural  affinity  for 
the  school  of  thought  which  he  most  clearly  rep 
resented,  and  something  akin  to  his  intuitions  in 
my  own  way  of  viewing  personal  and  social  mat 
ters,  brought  me  into  relations  with  him  long  be 
fore  I  ever  saw  him,  or  heard  that  thrilling  voice 
which  few  who  had  listened  to  its  deeper  tone 
could  ever  forget.  I  was  indeed  as  much  younger 
than  Emerson  as  Persius  was  younger  than  his 
revered  Stoic  philosopher,  Cornutus ;  but  I  could 
have  said,  and  often  did  say  to  myself,  after  be 
coming  intimate  with  the  Concord  philosopher, 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 
what  young  Persius  proclaimed  in  lasting  Latin 
verse:— 

" Nescio  quod  certe  est,  quod  me  tibi  temperat  astrum." 
'T  was  sure  some  star  attuned  my  fate  to  thine. 

I  must  have  begun  to  read  Emerson  before  six 
teen  ;  for  in  my  sixteenth  year  I  remember  perus 
ing  with  indignation  Francis  Bo  wen's  review  of 
the  Poems,  which  came  out  in  the  North  Ameri 
can  Review  for  1847;  and  it  was  soon  after  that 
I  first  made  Carlyle's  acquaintance  in  his  early 
book,  Sartor  Resartus.  The  second  edition  of  Em 
erson's  Nature  came  in  1849,  when  I  was  seven 
teen;  and  at  eighteen  I  had  read  the  Essays,  and 
the  remarkable  biographical  criticism  of  Plato, 
Shakespeare,  Montaigne,  and  Napoleon  in  Rep 
resentative  Men.  But  the  little  town  where  I  was 
born  and  spent  all  these  earliest  years,  with  the 
exception  of  a  few  weeks  at  Boston  in  1843, 
though  abounding  in  good  books  and  inspiring 
teachers,  hardly  ever  attracted  a  lecturer  of  more 
than  local  repute;  and  Exeter,  its  market-town 
and  seat  of  learning,  had  no  inclination  to  invite 
Transcendentalists  to  its  "Lyceum."  I  remember 

[8] 


EMERSON 

in  my  nineteenth  year,  as  I  was  reading  Greek 
with  Professor  Hoyt  of  the  Exeter  Academy,  he 
related  to  me  how  his  classmates  at  Dartmouth 
invited  Emerson  in  1838  to  give  them  that  grand 
discourse  on  Literary  Ethics  which  was  one  of 
the  first  of  his  orations  I  had  read,  how  few  under 
stood  it,  and  how  Emerson  repelled  the  proposal 
of  reporting  it.  "I  curse  the  Reporters,"  said  the 
gentle  sage, — "I  curse  them";  so,  at  least,  my  old 
teacher  reported  that  Emerson  at  Hanover  had 
said  to  him.  But  when,  many  years  after,  I  cited 
this  remark  to  Emerson,  he  could  not  believe  he 
had  made  it.  But  his  opinion  was  so  constant,— 
that  the  casual  reporter  is  sure  to  misunderstand 
and  misreport, — and  he  had  suffered  so  often 
therefrom,  that  I  never  really  doubted  the  exact 
memory  of  Professor  Hoyt.  Singularly  enough, 
Emerson  disliked  even  the  exact  reporter,  though 
for  a  different  reason,  of  course.  He  was  almost 
morbidly  sensitive  about  repeating  his  essays  to 
those  who  had  read  them  in  full;  thinking  it  de 
prived  him  of  their  fresh  attention,  and  lost  them 
the  interest  of  surprise,  on  which  his  rhetoric  so 

[3] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
largely  depended  at  the  first  hearing.  In  the  last 
decade  of  his  life  he  gave  in  Concord  that  essay 
on  Eloquence  which  came  out  shortly  before  his 
death,  in  the  volume  called  Letters  and  Social 
Aims, — a  title  that  gave  him  much  trouble,  like 
the  definition  of  "civilization."  It  was  new  to  me, 
in  February,  1875,  and  I  knew  it  would  be  pleas 
ing  to  readers  of  the  Springfield  Republican.  I 
therefore  took  full  notes,  and  spent  the  next  day 
or  two  in  looking  up  the  orators  he  had  quoted,— 
Lafayette,  John  Quincy  Adams,  and  Canning, — 
and  was  fortunate  enough  to  find  the  very  page 
from  which  he  had  copied  a  remarkable  address 
of  Lafayette  to  the  Chamber  of  Deputies  (June 
21,  1815),  in  which  he  threw  down  the  gauntlet 
to  Napoleon. 

As  Emerson,  for  some  reason,  omitted  it  from 
his  volume,  and  it  may  be  unknown  to  my 
readers,  I  will  quote  it  as  Emerson  read  it  to  us 
at  the  Concord  "Lyceum":— 

"Napoleon,  returning  from  Elba,  was  obliged 
to  summon  a  Chamber  of  Deputies,  and  among 
them  came  Lafayette.  When  Napoleon  came  back 

[4] 


EMERSON 

from  Waterloo  to  Paris,  he  resolved  to  abolish 
this  Assembly.  Lafayette  heard  of  it.  In  the  first 
session  afterward  he  ascended  the  tribune  with 
out  delay,  and  said:  'When  for  the  first  time  in 
many  years  I  raise  in  this  Chamber  a  voice  which 
the  friends  of  free  institutions  will  recognize,  I 
feel  myself  called  upon,  Gentlemen,  to  address 
you  respecting  the  dangers  of  the  country,  which 
you  alone  are  now  able  to  save.  Sinister  reports 
have  been  spread  abroad ;  they  are  now  unhappily 
confirmed.  The  moment  has  arrived  for  rallying 
around  the  old  tri-colored  standard  of  1789,— 
the  standard  of  liberty,  equality,  and  public  or 
der.  Permit,  Gentlemen,  a  veteran  in  this  sacred 
cause,  one  who  was  ever  a  stranger  to  the  spirit  of 
faction,  to  submit  to  you  some  resolutions, — the 
necessity  of  which,  I  trust,  you  will  feel  as  I  do. 
Let  this  Assembly  declare  itself  in  permanent 
session ;  let  it  send  for  the  ministers  of  State,  and 
require  of  them  a  report  on  the  present  aspect 
of  affairs.'  The  Assembly  voted  as  Lafayette  had 
proposed.  Then  Lucien  Bonaparte,  who  was  a 
deputy,  rose  in  his  place,  bowed  to  Lafayette  with 

[5] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 
profound  respect,  and  left  the  hall.  In  two  hours 
Napoleon  sent  in  his  abdication." 

But  to  my  story.  When  this  report  appeared, 
five  days  after,  in  my  newspaper,  Emerson  saw  it 
and  was  grieved.  He  met  me  in  the  street  and 
said,  "You  should  not  have  reported  my  quota 
tions.  Dog  must  not  eat  dog."  I  explained  my  rea 
sons;  but  they  did  not  convince  him;  he  wished 
to  use  that  lecture  again,  and  thought  this  report 
hindered  him. 

It  was  not  till  I  entered  Harvard  College,  in 
the  summer  of  1852,  that  I  had  opportunities 
of  hearing  and  meeting  Emerson.  I  had  heard 
Theodore  Parker  in  the  year  before ;  but  in  April, 
1851,  when  I  visited  Boston  for  the  second  time, 
and  Concord  for  the  first  time,  Emerson  was  not 
making  public  addresses,  in  the  week  or  ten  days 
at  my  disposal;  and  though  I  passed  his  house, 
whose  door  stood  invitingly  open  (his  daughter 
Ellen  descending  the  stairway,  reminding  me  of 
some  angel  in  Allston's  Jacob's  Dream],  I  had 
not  then  the  courage  to  call  on  him.  I  did  so  for 
the  first  time  in  July,  1853,  after  hearing  him 

[6] 


EMERSON 

lecture  occasionally,  and  after  meeting  Alcott, 
Parker,  Mrs.  Cheney,  and  others  of  his  friends.  I 
had  walked  up  from  Cambridge  to  Concord  over 
the  Turnpike,  on  my  way  to  visit  Henry  Shaw,  a 
former  schoolmate,  in  Sudbury.  Reaching  Emer 
son's  house,  at  the  corner  where  the  Cambridge 
Turnpike  debouches  into  the  Lexington  road 
(now  Massachusetts  Avenue),  about  eleven  in 
the  morning,  I  rang  the  bell  and  was  shown  at 
once  into  the  study,  where  Emerson  sat  in  his 
accustomed  chair,  facing  the  Fates  of  Michel 
Angelo  over  the  mantel.  He  was  either  reading 
or  writing,  as  his  morning  habit  was.  I  had  no 
letter  of  introduction,  but  perhaps  used  the  name 
of  some  mutual  friend,  Alcott  or  Parker;  was 
received  graciously,  and  questioned  about  the 
young  men  in  College,  where  I  had  just  ended 
my  Sophomore  year,  with  some  small  tokens  of 
distinction  among  classmates, — a  Society  Poem, 
or  something  of  the  kind.  I  observed  that,  after 
giving  me  one  of  those  gently  piercing  glances 
which  took  in  so  much  of  the  character  of  his 
visitors,  he  did  not  look  directly  at  me  in  ques- 

m 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

tioning  or  replying;  but  gazed  at  one  side,  as  if 
withdrawing  his  mind  from  persons  to  ideas. 
What  I  remember  best  of  his  remarks  is  his  hop 
ing  to  see  a  "good  crop  of  mystics  at  Harvard," 
— the  last  place  in  which  many  of  that  class  were 
to  be  found,  or  had  been,  for  some  years. 

Emerson  was  then  in  the  vigor  of  middle  age, 
just  turned  of  fifty,  in  good  health  and  fine  color, 
with  abundant  dark  brown  hair,  no  beard,  but  a 
slight  whisker  on  each  cheek,  and  plainly  dressed. 
His  form  was  never  other  than  slender,  after  I 
knew  him,  and  his  shoulders,  like  Thoreau's,  had 
that  peculiar  slope  which  had  attracted  notice  in 
England,  where  the  New  England  type  of  Anglo- 
Norman  was  not  so  well  known  as  it  has  since 
become.  His  striking  features  were  the  noble 
brow,  from  which  the  hair  was  carelessly  thrown 
back,  though  not  long,  and  the  mild  and  penetrat 
ing  blue  eye,  smiling,  in  its  social  mood,  in  the 
most  friendly  manner,  but  capable,  on  rare  occa 
sions,  of  much  severity.  The  portrait  by  David 
Scott,  painted  at  Edinburgh  five  years  before, 
erred  by  giving  him  a  complexion  and  an  eye  too 

[8] 


EMERSON 

dark;  but  in  its  general  expression  was  then  al 
most  perfect;  and  five  years  later,  in  1858,  Rowse 
drew  and  threw  aside  an  unfinished  head  which 
best  preserves  the  noble  serenity  of  his  gaze. 

From  the  date  of  this  visit,  although  at  first  I 
saw  Emerson  but  seldom,  I  felt  at  ease  in  his 
company,  except  in  those  moments  which  all  his 
intimates  experienced  (and  some  of  them  bitterly 
lamented  and  complained  of),  when  he  seemed 
to  be  removed  to  an  infinite  distance  from  human 
companionship,  and  hardly  to  recognize  the  pres 
ence  of  those  with  whom  he  seemed  to  be  con 
versing.  This  trait,  or  circumstance, — for  it  must 
have  been  a  part  of  his  fate,  rather  than  an  ele 
ment  in  his  disposition,  which  was  eminently  so 
cial  and  friendly, — I  was  wont  to  explain  by  his 
superiority  of  nature,  which  of  necessity  isolated 
him  from  those  around  him,  until  by  the  force  of 
will  and  generosity  he  brought  himself  within  the 
daily  round  of  common  thoughts  and  cares,  in 
which  he  did  not  naturally  belong.  His  was  the 
higher  poetic  nature,  to  which  the  phenomenal 
world  presents  itself  as  a  phantasm  rather  than  a 

[9] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
fact,  and  from  which  the  daily  events  and  com 
panionships  of  life  seem  strangely  averse  and  re 
mote.  The  ecstasies  and  profundities  of  religious 
and  philosophic  meditation  are  akin  to  this  poetic 
exaltation;  and  all  were  mingled  and  exemplified 
in  some  of  those  experiences  which  Emerson  has 
himself  narrated,  and  which  appeared  also  in  the 
solitary  and  thoughtful  spiritual  life  of  his  eccen 
tric  aunt,  Mary  Moody  Emerson.  To  her,  as  he 
was  wont  to  say,  he  was  much  indebted  for  his 
early  induction  into  the  graver  paths  of  self-cul 
ture.  The  typical  passage  on  this  matter  in  Em 
erson's  books  is  that  which  occurs  so  early  in  the 
first  one,  his  philosophic  abridgment  called  Na 
ture,  where  he  says  of  himself:  "All  mean  egotism 
vanishes.  I  become  a  transparent  eye-ball;  I  am 
nothing,  I  see  all;  the  currents  of  the  Universal 
Being  circulate  through  me ;  I  am  part  or  parcel 
of  God.  The  name  of  the  nearest  friend  sounds 
then  foreign  and  accidental:  to  be  brothers,  to 
be  acquaintances, — master  or  servant,  is  then  a 
trifle  and  a  disturbance." 

This  abstraction  and  aloofness  of  mind,  if  its 
[10J 


EMERSON 

powers  are  once  turned  toward  human  things, 
gives  extreme  clearness  of  vision  and  apprecia 
tion.  Emerson  said  of  himself,  "I  have  the  fatal 
gift  of  perception";  and  those  who  saw  much  of 
him  soon  learned  to  understand  this,  without  al 
ways  knowing  from  what  quality  in  his  nature 
so  remarkable  a  gift  proceeded.  Simplicity  had 
something  to  do  with  it,  and  the  poetic  eye 
much  more,  George  Chapman,  himself  a  poet 
of  no  mean  order,  in  dedicating  his  version  of 
Homer  to  Lord  Howard  of  Walden,  said  well 
of  Poesy,  personified:— 

"  Virtue,  in  all  things  else  at  best,  she  betters, 

Honor  she  heightens,  and  gives  life  in  death ; 
She  is  the  ornament  and  soul  of  letters ; 

The  world's  deceit  before  her  vanisheth : 
Simple  she  is  as  doves,  like  serpents  wise, 

Sharp,  grave  and  sacred ;  nought  but  things  divine 
And  things  divining  fit  her  faculties, — 

Accepting  her  as  she  is  genuine." 

This  saying  could  hardly  be  applied  in  literal 
strictness  to  any  man;  but  it  came  near  to  the 
higher  moods  of  Emerson.  He  had  also  a  prac 
tical  side,  which  often  puzzled  those  who  expected 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
to  find  him  all  sage  or  all  poet,  and  perceived  in 
stead  an  unusual  versatility  or  even  worldliness. 
This  is  said  to  have  been  less  noticeable  before 
his  second  visit  to  England  in  1847-48,  which  was 
some  years  earlier  than  I  saw  him;  it  was  recog 
nized,  however,  by  Lowell  in  his  clever  portrayal 
of  Emerson  in  the  Fable  for  Critics,  which  first 
appeared  in  1848:  — 

"  A  Greek  head  on  right  Yankee  shoulders,  whose  range 
Has  Olympus  for  one  pole,  for  t'other  the  Exchange  ; 
A  Plotinus-Montaigne,  where  the  Egyptian's  gold  mist 
And  the  Gascon's  shrewd  wit  cheek-by-jowl  coexist; 
He  sits  in  a  mystery  calm  and  intense, 
And  looks  coolly  around  him  with  sharp  common-sense." 

When  I  first  knew  him,  in  the  years  1853-56, 
the  long  conflict  over  the  questions  of  American 
slavery  was  shaping  itself  for  final  decision  by 
the  ordeal  of  battle;  and  Emerson  had  taken  his 
public  attitude  on  it  some  ten  years  earlier,  —  a 
fact  which  for  a  time  escaped  the  notice  of  his 
friend  and  correspondent  Carlyle,  who  was  inclin 
ing  to  the  support  of  negro  slavery,  from  his  con 
tempt  for  the  African,  and  his  worship  of  force. 


[ 


EMERSON 

It  was  about  this  time,  say  in  1854,  when  I  had 
become  a  frequent  visitor  at  Theodore  Parker's 
hospitable  house  in  Exeter  Place,  Boston,  that  he 
told  me  the  story  of  his  own  colloquy  with  Car- 
lyle  on  this  point,  in  the  Chelsea  house,  in  1843, 
at  an  evening  conversation  when  Doctor  John 
Carlyle  was  present,  and  several  contemporaries 
were  discussed.  Parker  found  the  two  Carlyles  sit 
ting  round  the  open  fire,  where  on  the  hob  was  the 
kettle  heating  for  the  Scotch  beverage  of  whiskey 
punch.  At  first,  literature  was  the  theme,  and 
Tennyson,  then  just  rising  into  note  as  a  poet, 
though  he  had  been  long  known  to  Emerson,  in 
the  early  edition  of  1833,  which,  bound  in  red 
morocco,  used  to  lie  on  Emerson's  table.  Parker, 
who  was  not  so  good  a  judge  of  poets  as  of  theo- 
logues,  began  to  give  Carlyle  his  notion  of  Ten 
nyson,  as  an  exquisite  who  arrayed  himself  for 
writing  verse  in  a  silk-lined  dressing-gown,  and, 
seated  at  an  inlaid  table,  with  a  gold-tipped  quill, 
would  indite  verses  on  satin  paper,  like  "Airy, 
fairy  Lilian"  or  Claribel.  Carlyle  laughed  loud  at 
the  picture.  "Ow,  that's  not  so  at  all, — Alfred 

[13] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
comes  here  and  drinks  his  toddy  and  smokes  his 
pipe  like  the  rest  of  us ;  he  's  no  dandy  nor  milk 
sop."  America  then  coming  up  for  consideration, 
Carlyle  began  to  rail  against  "Quashee"  and  the 
Abolitionists,  whose  cause  Parker  championed,  of 
course.  But  Carlyle  said,  "Your  neighbor  Emer 
son's  no  Abolitionist;  he  thinks  about  these  things 
much  as  I  do."  "On  the  contrary,"  said  Parker, 
"he  no  longer  withdraws  from  association  with 
active  reformers,  like  Garrison,  but  is  outspok 
en  against  negro  slavery."  Carlyle  could  hardly 
believe  it.  "But,"  said  Parker  to  me,  "when  I 
reached  home  in  1844,  and  Emerson  had  printed 
that  trenchant  address  on  West  India  Emancipa 
tion,  which  Mrs.  Brooks,  Mrs.  Emerson,  and  the 
Thoreaus  made  an  occasion  for  him  to  give  in 
Concord  (August  1,  1844),  I  had  the  satisfaction 
of  sending  the  pamphlet  to  Carlyle  at  Chelsea." 
It  contained  this  passage,  among  others,  which 
indicates  how  the  slave  question  addressed  itself 
to  Emerson  when  I  first  knew  him: — 

"As  I  have  walked  in  these  pastures  and  along 
the  edge  of  woods,  I  could  not  keep  my  imagina- 

[14] 


EMERSON 

tion  on  agreeable  figures,  for  other  images  that 
intruded  on  me.  I  could  not  see  the  great  vision 
of  the  patriots  and  senators  who  have  adopted  the 
slave's  cause, — they  turned  their  backs  on  me. 
No:  I  see  other  pictures, — of  mean  men:  I  see 
very  poor,  very  ill-clothed,  very  ignorant  men,  not 
surrounded  by  happy  friends, — to  be  plain,  poor 
black  men  of  obscure  employment  as  mariners, 
cooks  or  stewards  in  ships,  yet  citizens  of  this 
our  Commonwealth, — freeborn  as  we,  whom  the 
slave-laws  of  South  Carolina  have  arrested  in  ves 
sels,  and  shut  up  in  jails.  This  man,  these  men, 
these  men  I  see,  and  no  law  to  save  them.  .  .  . 
Gentlemen,  I  thought  the  deck  of  a  Massachu 
setts  ship  was  as  much  the  territory  of  Massachu 
setts  as  the  floor  on  which  we  stand.  It  should  be 
as  sacred  as  the  temple  of  God.  If  such  a  dam 
nable  outrage  can  be  committed  on  the  person  of 
a  citizen  with  impunity,  let  the  Governor  break 
the  broad  seal  of  the  State;  he  bears  the  sword 
in  vain." 

No  doubt  Emerson  was  thinking  of  the  crest 
and  legend  on  the  State  seal  of  our  State, — the 

[15] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
arm  with  uplifted  sword  grasped  in  a  firm  hand, 
picturing  the  first  half-line  of  Algernon  Sidney's 
inscription  in  the  table-book  of  the  King  of  Den 
mark, — while  the  legend  gave  the  other  line, 
promising  freedom  to  all  who  might  come  under 
our  flag: — 

" Manus  hcec,  inimica  tyrannis, 
Ense  petit  placidam  sub  libertate  quietem." 

This  device  and  motto,  selected  by  John  Adams, 
who  framed  our  first  State  Constitution,  and  pre 
sided  at  its  revision,  forty  years  after,  I  once 
translated  thus:— 

This  hand,  the  tyrant's  foe, 
Seeks  peace,  through  freedom,  with  a  manly  blow. 

Emerson  had  a  great  admiration  for  both  the 
Adamses,  John  and  John  Quincy;  he  once  told 
me  that  John  Adams  was  in  his  view  the  great 
est  of  the  Revolutionary  patriots, — superior  to 
Franklin  or  Jefferson,  and,  though  not  Washing 
ton's  equal  in  moral  qualities  or  military  talent, 
a  far  better  writer.  Washington,  he  said,  was  a 
heavy  writer,  and  against  Jefferson  he  had  re 
tained  some  of  the  prejudices  of  the  Boston  Fed- 

[16] 


EMERSON 

eralists,  in  which  he  had  grown  up.  His  brother 
Edward,  who  died  early  in  Porto  Rico,  was  tu 
tor  of  some  of  the  elder  Adams's  grandsons,  and 
Waldo  Emerson  liked  to  relate  the  visit  the  two 
brothers  made  to  the  old  statesman  at  Quincy ;  he 
read  it  to  me  from  his  journal  of  February,  1825, 
before  he  included  it  in  his  essay  on  Old  Age. 
They  found  the  old  President  in  his  easy-chair, 
calmly  awaiting  the  death  that  found  him  there 
the  next  year.  When  they  asked  him  about  his 
son,  who  had  just  been  chosen  President,  he 
praised  the  political  prudence  of  John  Quincy 
Adams,  but  said,  "I  shall  never  see  him  again ;  he 
will  not  come  to  Quincy  but  to  my  funeral;  it 
would  be  a  great  satisfaction  to  me  to  see  him, 
but  I  don't  wish  him  to  come  on  my  account." 
He  lived  to  see  his  son  more  than  once,  though 
ninety  years  old  in  1825.  When  I  related  to  Em 
erson  a  story  of  Adams  in  his  old  age,  which  I  had 
from  Theodore  Parker,  and  he  from  Reverend 
Doctor  Gray  of  Roxbury,  he  refused  to  believe  it, 
such  was  his  veneration  for  John  Adams;  though 
the  anecdote  was  quite  in  keeping  with  his  well- 

[17] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 
known  irascibility.  Doctor  Gray  was  invited  to 
dine  with  the  ex-President  at  the  house  of  a  pa 
rishioner,  and,  as  Mr.  Adams  was  leaving  early, 
the  Doctor  stepped  into  the  hall  to  help  him  on 
with  his  overcoat.  Then  ensued  this  colloquy:— 
Adams.  I  thank  you,  Doctor  Gray,  for  your  po 
lite  attention. 

Gray.  Do  not  mention  it,  Mr.  Adams;  no  at 
tention  is  too  great,  no  trouble  is  too  much,  that 
we  of  this  century  have  the  privilege  of  taking 
for  the  patriots  of  the  Revolution, — for  General 
Washington  and  yourself,  Sir. 
Adams.  Do  not  name  Washington  to  me,  Sir! 
Washington  was  a  dolt! 

"No,"  said  Emerson,  "I  cannot  believe  that 
story;"  nor  would  he,  when  I  gave  him  my  au 
thority.  He  loved  also  to  cite  the  eloquence  of 
John  Quincy  Adams,  which  he  has  described  in 
one  of  his  essays.  Indeed,  he  was  a  follower  of 
eloquent  men,  and  once  told  me  that  he  reported 
a  great  speech  of  Harrison  Gray  Otis,  then  reck 
oned  Boston's  chief  orator,  and  was  complimented 
by  Otis  on  his  accuracy.  He  had  in  truth  a  re- 

[18] 


EMERSON 

markable  verbal  memory,  as  all  poets  should  have; 
since  much  of  their  easy  writing  of  verse  depends 
upon  it. 

Quincy  Adams  was  dead  and  gone  before  I 
ever  saw  Emerson ;  so  was  Webster  before  I  ever 
conversed  with  him;  but  Emerson  liked  to  com 
memorate  those  earlier  days,  before  Webster  made 
his  gran  rifiuto,  in  1850,  and  went  to  his  grave 
in  1852  under  the  heavy  censure  of  the  best  sen 
timent  in  Massachusetts.  It  was  to  Emerson  that 
Carlyle  in  1839  wrote  his  remarkable  word-por 
trait  of  Webster  in  England,  which  the  Concord 
friend  allowed  Webster's  biographers  to  copy,  and 
which  disclosed  the  unhandsome  as  well  as  the 
glorious  features  of  his  character.  In  1845,  when 
Webster  and  Choate  came  to  Concord  for  a  week, 
to  defend  the  fraudulent  bank  officer  (against 
whose  offence  there  was  then  no  countervailing 
law),  and  got  him  acquitted,  Mrs.  Emerson,  who 
remembered  Webster  in  black  dress-coat  and 
small-clothes  at  the  Plymouth  Pilgrim  festival  of 
1820,  where  he  made  one  of  his  noblest  orations, 
gave  a  reception  for  Webster  and  the  gentlemen 

[19  J 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
of  the  Middlesex  Bar,  of  which  the  leader  was 
then  Samuel  Hoar  of  Concord,  father  of  Senator 
Hoar.  Edward  Emerson,  before  his  health  gave 
way,  and  he  went  to  the  West  Indies  in  the  hope 
of  restoration,  had  been  the  tutor  of  Webster's 
sons,  and  had  studied  law  in  the  great  man's  Bos 
ton  office.  But  the  flaw  in  the  metal  of  Webster 
did  not  escape  the  piercing  insight  of  Emerson, 
long  before  he  betrayed  his  trust  on  the  slavery 
question.  He  told  me  one  or  two  anecdotes  of 
Webster's  chronic  insensibility  to  the  demands 
of  honor  where  money  was  concerned, — one  of 
them  dating  back  before  1830;  and  when  the 
March  speech  of  1850  came  to  shatter  the  hopes 
of  Webster's  anti-slavery  friends,  whom  he  should 
have  led  instead  of  deserting,  Emerson  wrote  in 
his  journal : — 

"Why  did  all  manly  gifts  in  Webster  fail? 
He  wrote  on  Nature's  noblest  brow,,  FOB  SALE." 

He  also,  just  before  I  made  his  personal  acquaint 
ance,  gave  a  public  address,  at  Cambridge  and 
elsewhere,  in  which  he  portrayed  the  scope  of 
Webster's  mind,  and  the  lack  of  moral  greatness 

[20] 


EMERSON 

in  the  man  so  grandly  endowed;  but  he  would 
never  publish  it,  and  it  has  never  appeared  in  full. 
Of  Waldo  Emerson's  brothers,  to  whom  he 
was  most  tenderly  attached,  I  saw  only  William, 
the  eldest,  and  Bulkeley,  the  "innocent,"-— who, 
though  a  bright  and  capable  child  up  to  the  age 
of  ten  or  twelve,  then  had  his  mental  growth 
arrested  by  some  severe  malady,  and  continued 
through  a  long  life  to  be  dependent  on  others 
for  his  care  and  comfort.  While  I  knew  him,  he 
resided  in  Littleton,  a  few  miles  wrest  of  Con 
cord,  adjoining  Harvard,  where  his  father,  Rev 
erend  William  Emerson,  had  his  first  parish,  and 
where  many  of  the  descendants  of  Reverend 
Peter  Bulkeley,  the  founder  of  Concord  in  1635, 
were  then  living.  William  Emerson  was  a  lawyer 
of  success  in  New  York  City,  with  a  house  on 
Staten  Island  before  I  knew  him,  in  which  Tho- 
reau  lived  for  a  time  in  1843,  as  the  tutor  of  his 
three  sons,  and  where  Ellery  Channing,  during  his 
short  residence  in  New  York  as  one  of  the  editors 
of  the  Tribune,  under  Horace  Greeley,  used  to 
visit.  I  soon  met  William  Emerson  at  his  brother's 

[21  ] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
house  in  Concord,  and  when  I  first  visited  New 
York,  in  the  spring  of  1856,  I  dined  at  his  city 
house,  and  heard  from  him  the  story  of  his  in 
terview  with  Goethe  in  1825,  or  about  that  time. 
Emerson  had  early  told  me  of  this,  and  that, 
when  the  young  American,  who  was  destined  for 
the  pulpit,  like  his  ancestors  for  many  genera 
tions,  laid  before  the  German  sage  his  religious 
doubts,  and  sought  counsel  whether  he  should 
preach  or  not,  Goethe  advised  him  to  swallow  his 
scruples  and  preach.  The  conscientious  Christian 
could  not  do  this;  he  returned  to  his  mother's 
Roxbury  home  in  October,  1825,  and  saddened 
her  by  giving  up  his  purpose  of  entering  the  min 
istry,  beginning  the  study  of  law  soon  after.  He 
was  a  faithful,  courteous,  but  slightly  formal  gen 
tleman,  well  read  and  affectionate,  but  rather  anti 
pathetic  to  Thoreau  and  the  more  eccentric  Tran- 
scendentalists.  I  also  knew  for  a  few  years  that 
noteworthy  aunt  of  the  Emersons,  Miss  Mary 
Moody  Emerson,  the  youngest  child  of  Emerson's 
grandfather,  who  built  the  Old  Manse,  where  she 
was  born;  and  she  used  to  say  "she  was  in  arms 

[22] 


EMERSON 

at  Concord  Fight"  because  her  mother  (who  had 
a  brother  and  cousins  on  the  Tory  side)  held  her 
up  at  the  window  to  see  the  redcoats  as  they 
marched  past  the  Parsonage  on  their  way  to  the 
historic  North  Bridge.  She  was  therefore  more 
than  eighty  when  I  met  her  at  her  nephew's  fire 
side, — a  small,  energetic,  by  no  means  beautiful 
person,  but  of  singular  talents  and  much  origi 
nality,  which  had  been  of  great  service  to  the 
children  of  her  deceased  brother,  as  they  grew  up 
under  her  eye.  Like  her  nephew,  she  had  great 
regard  for  beautiful  persons, — men,  women,  or 
children, — and  equally  good  esteem  for  original 
persons,  though  they  might  hold  opinions  which 
she  abhorred.  Thoreau  was  such  a  person;  and 
her  interest  in  him,  which  he  reciprocated,  gave 
a  piquancy  to  their  interviews,  and  to  her  com 
ments  on  him,  made  to  me  and  others.  She  did 
not  accept  Bronson  Alcott  in  the  same  way, 
though  admiring  his  fine  aspect  and  graceful 
manners.  When  she  first  heard  him  explain  his 
new  system  of  instruction  for  children,  which  he 
was  then  exemplifying  in  Boston,  she  wrote  to 

[23] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 
him  (October  30,  1835)  thus:- 

"  While  the  form  dazzled, — while  the  speaker 
inspired  confidence, — the  foundations  of  the— 
the — superstructure,  gilded  and  golden,  was  in 
depths  of, — I  will  tell  you  plainly  what,  when  I 
am  furnished  more  with  terms  as  well  as  prin 
ciples.  No  marvel  that  Age  is  at  a  loss  to  express 
itself  about  a  system,  theory  or  whatever,  which 
is  proposed  for  Infancy.  If  you  will  have  the  kind 
ness  to  send  me  a  letter  including  the  Conversa 
tion,  and  as  much  more  as  you  can  afford,  I  will, 
if  you  give  leave,  express  myself  more  plainly,  on 
a  ground  which  now  seems  to  give  way  to  my 
literality  and  common-sense  philosophy.  It  will 
gratify  me  if  you  will  read  a  book  which  I  left 
for  you  at  Front  Street,  13.  It  is  an  antidote  to 
your  opinions,  and  is  modern  Unitarianism  of  a 
higher  order;  and  I  know  no  one  whom  I  wish  to 
read  it  more  than  yourself." 

Having  administered  this  courtly  reproof,  Miss 
Mary  gave  the  needful  sugar-plum  at  the  close 
of  her  letter:  "Mr.  Emerson  came  to  welcome  me 
home;  but  he  talked  of  nothing  but  the  pleasure 

[24] 


EMERSON 

of  seeing  you.  Affectionate  regards  to  Mrs.  Al- 
cott,  and  hearty  wishes  for  your  success."  Three 
years  later,  when  the  " tempest  in  a  wash-bowl," 
as  Emerson  styled  it,  over  his  Divinity  Hall  Ad 
dress  of  1838  was  raging,  this  proud  and  loving, 
but  controversial,  aunt  of  his  wrote  to  her  half- 
brother,  Reverend  Samuel  Ripley  of  Waltham 
(who  had  married  her  dearest  young  friend,  Miss 
Sarah  Bradford),  as  follows:  — 

[No  year  date,  but  presumably  1839, — the  postage  six  cents.] 

"BELFAST,  18  (Sabbath  ev'g)  November. 
ffMY  DEAR  BROTHER: 

"  The  pleasure  of  hearing  of  your  clerical  arrangements  by  the  Reg- 
"  ister  last  week  makes  me  write  for  very  gladness.  What  time  will 
"  be  given  you, — and  how  desirable  to  unite  the  sheep  into  onefold! 
"  A  subject  which  I  have  waited  since  Sarah's  conversation  in  the 
"  Vale  [Old  Manse]  to  know  about,  with  no  little  interest.  And  God 
fe  forbid  that  you  preach  as  you  write  to  me,  when  expatiating  on  the 
"  virtues  of  those  whose  Christian  faith  is  broken  up  into  the  glitter- 
"  ing  fragments  of  a  corrupted  philosophy  and  pantheistic  specters! 
ee  Talk  of  Waldo  s  virtues, — /  know  and  respect  them, — so  had 
"  Spinoza  and  Fichte  and  Kant  [virtues].  And  they  were  and  are 
"  the  gifts  of  that  Being  who  may  be  said  to  laugh  at  their  chimeras. 
"  To  talk  of  a  holy  life  and  benevolence,  as  you  do,  unless  those 
"  virtues  are  based  on  the  personal  Infinite,  is  like  mistaking  the  me- 

[25] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

"  tears  of  night  for  the  lamp  of  day.  The  constitution  of  man  for- 
"  bids  it, — history  proves  it, — and  Revelation  must  be  left  out  of 
"  the  question  to  profess  it.  It  is  true  that  the  Jine  feelings  and  in- 
"  stincts  may  prevail  in  the  high  and  pleasant  places  for  a  time; 
"  but  even  these  have  received  their  charms  from  that  divine  phi- 
"  losophy  which  they  are  outshining. 

"No,  —  the  only  basis  of  all  virtue  must  be  (so  divinely  consti- 
"  tuted  is  our  poor  nature,  with  all  its  awful  capacity  for  sin} — 
"  that  we  are  capable  of  loving  supremely  the  Infinite;  and  on  that 
"capacity  is  engrafted  all  benevolent  principle:  while  the  criterion 
"  of  virtue  in  its  highest  state  must  always  be,  that  one  would  not 
"  sin,  were  the  Deity  never  to  know  it.  But  is  it  not  to  obedience  unto 
"  His  moral  law  guiding  our  conscience,  that  we  owe  this  love  of 
"Truth,  Justice,  Benevolence,  —  three  divine  attributes?  Is  it  not 
"  thro  a  personification  of  them  in  Jesus  that  we  have  been  enlighl- 
"  ened,  and  the  charms  of  these  modern  philosophers  have  been  thus 
"  derived  ?  I  continue  to  desire  the  correspondence  of  Norton  and 
"  Ripley, — especially  as  I  have  read  Furness,  and  with  delight,  at 
"  some  glimpses  he  catches  of  our  Master :  while  his  theory  is  often 
"  upset  by  facts.  He  is  an  idealist,  perhaps,  and  must  stand  some- 
"  what  tottling.  And  Wares  sermon  I  should  like  to  borrow,  and 
"  the  Edin.  Review  for  Oct.  1829.  There  is  a  woeful  scarcity  of 
"  books  (modern}  here.  Let  Waldo  know  of  the  means  of  sending, 
"  if  you  chance  to  see  him.  And  now,  dear  S.,  farewell!  preach  as  at 
"  Waltham;  the  day  and  the  hour  of  Sabbath  excitement  I  remember 
"  with  sad  pleasure.  Love  to  Sarah,  whose  brilliant  and  comprehen- 
"  sive  subjects  Lizzie  [Ripley]  tells  me  about. 

"  Your  off.  Sister,  M.  M.  E. 

[28] 


EMERSON 

"Say  not  a  word  of  the  contents  of  this  to  Waldo,  as  you 
"  would  be  true  to  me.  /  have  also  a  letter  to  him  by  the  same 
"mail,  and  forgot  to  name  the  means  of  writing,  etc." 

It  was  this  lady  who,  admiring  the  brilliant  wit 
of  Talleyrand, — not  unlike  her  own,  except  that 
hers  was  crowded  with  devout  imaginings, — said 
with  a  sigh,  "I  fear  he  is  not  organized  for  a 
future  state."  Her  nephew  Waldo,  whom  she 
trained  and  inspired,  and  whom  she  did  not  wish 
to  pain  by  her  censures  written  to  his  Uncle  Hip- 
ley,  once  said  of  her, — "Her  wit  was  so  fertile, 
and  only  used  to  strike,  that  she  never  used  it  for 
display,  any  more  than  a  wasp  would  parade  his 
sting."  He  told  me  that  "she  was  in  her  time  the 
best  writer  in  Massachusetts";  and  he  gave  this 
parallel  in  a  public  lecture,  largely  made  up  of 
his  Aunt  Mary's  writings  :- 

"When  I  read  Dante  the  other  day,  and  his 
paraphrases  to  signify  with  more  adequateness 
Christ  or  Jehovah,  whom  do  you  think  I  was  re 
minded  of?  Whom  but  Mary  Emerson  and  her 
eloquent  theology?" 

Twenty  years  or  so  after  this  thrust  at  Al- 
[27] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
eottvs  theories  and  hear  nephew  s  Transcendental 
ism,  I  saw  her  rise  up  in  Emerson's  parlor  and  in- 
v  righ  with  sudden  vehemence  and  success  against 
what  she  thought  the  antinomian  declarations 
by  Henry  James*  Senior  setting  at  naught  the 
moral  law*  and  replying  to  Alcott  and  Thoreau, 
in  a  set  conversation,  with  some  of  his  usual  para 
doxes.  It  was  in  December*  1858,  and  Thoreau 
thus  sketched  the  scene  in  one  of  his  tetters  to 
Harrison  Blake:- 

"I  met  Henry  James;  the  other  night  at  Emer 
son's,  at  an  Alcottian  conversation,  at  which*  how- 
carer*  Alcott  did  not  talk  much,  being  disturbed 
by  James's  opposition.  Hie  latter  is  a  hearty  man 
enough,  with  whom  you  can  differ  very  satisfac 
torily*  both  on  account  of  his  doctrines  and  his 
good  temper.  He  utters  quasi-philanthropic  dog 
mas  in  a  metaphysie  dress;  but  they  are*  for  all 
practical  purposes*  very  erode.  He  charges  society 
with  all  the  crime  committed*  and  praises  the 
criminal  for  committing  it.  But  I  think  that  all 
the  remedies  he  suggests  out  of  his  head* — for  he 
goes  no  farther*  hearty  as  he  is, — would  leave  us 

.  *  • 


EMERSON 

about  where  we  are  now" 

The  question  Is  as  new  and  fresh  to-day  as  it 
was  when  Mary  Emerson,1  with  her  citations  from 
the  Bible  and  Doctor  Samuel  Clarke,  denounced 
the  smiling  and  much -amused  James  for  his  lax 
notions, — clasping  her  hands  and  raising  them 
above  her  head,  with  its  odd  fillet  of  black  silk, 
worn  to  conceal  a  scar.  Enthusiasm,  tempered  by 
decorum,  seems  to  have  been  the  mark  of  the 
Emerson  family;  for  I  have  beard  Mrs.  Sarah 
Ripley  tell  how,  in  the  Boston  house  where  the 
clergyman's  widow,  assisted  by  Mary  Emerson, 
was  feeding,  clothing,  and  training  her  orphan 
sons,  Charles  Chauncy  Emerson,  sitting  in  his 
low  chair  near  his  aunt,  while  her  caller  was  talk 
ing,  would  start  up  and  interpose  a  remark,  ex 
cited  by  the  subject  they  were  discussing,  and 
would  need  to  be  quieted  by  the  good  lady. 

Of  this  brother  Charles  I  have  heard  Emerson 
speak,  but  not  so  much  as  of  his  older  brother 
Edward,  already  mentioned,  the  handsomest  and 
most  brilliant  (by  report)  of  this  noted  family. 
Doctor  Holmes,  in  his  first  long  poem,  read  at 

[29] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

Harvard  College,  mentioned  Charles  Emerson 
and  his  then  recent  death,  and  again,  in  address 
ing  the  Historical  Society  after  Waldo  Emerson's 
death  in  1882,  he  said  with  much  feeling:— 

"Of  Charles,  the  youngest  brother,  I  knew 
something  in  my  college  days;  a  beautiful,  high- 
souled,  pure,  exquisitely  delicate  nature,  in  a 
slight  but  finely  wrought  mortal  frame.  He  was 
for  me  the  very  ideal  of  an  embodied  celestial  in 
telligence.  Coming  into  my  room  one  day,  he  took 
up  a  copy  of  Hazlitt's  British  Poets,  opened  it  to 
the  poem  of  Andrew  Marvell,  The  Nymph  Com 
plaining  for  the  Death  of  her  Fawn,  and  read  it 
to  me,  with  delight  irradiating  his  expressive  fea 
tures.  I  felt,  as  many  have  felt  after  being  with 
his  brother  Waldo,  that  I  had  entertained  an 
angel  visitant.  The  Fawn  of  Marvell's  imagina 
tion  survives  in  my  memory  as  the  fitting  image 
to  recall  this  beautiful  youth ;  a  soul  glowing  like 
the  rose  of  morning  with  its  enthusiasm, — a  char 
acter  white  as  the  lilies  in  its  purity." 

It  must  have  been  some  three  years  after  this 
that  Charles  Emerson,  visiting  his  grandfather's 

[30] 


v- 


<->-£/- 


f 


/ 


V    +* 


^          X 


/t£-<«-7--         U^f^-C        /x>r</          -/A-J^M.^ 


P—&  s-c*^st*r 

£        7^ 


^Xr>x  t        t^^J     a.     '?uu^ 


EMERSON 

Old  Manse  before  Waldo  went  there  to  write  his 
first  book,  Nature,  wrote  the  accompanying  letter 
to  Doctor  Ripley,  whose  house  had  been  the  re 
sort  of  the  brothers  in  their  youth,  and  for  whom 
they  cherished  a  warm  affection.  It  will  interest 
from  the  rarity  of  his  writings,  of  which  but  few 
have  been  printed  by  his  more  famous  brother, 
and  from  the  allusion  made  in  it  to  the  teaching 
of  Greek  to  girls  at  that  early  date  in  Concord. 
One  of  the  "young  ladies"  was  doubtless  Miss 
Elizabeth  Hoar,  to  whom  in  after  years  Charles 
was  affianced. 

This  acquaintance  begun  with  Waldo  Emerson 
in  the  summer  of  1853  soon  became  intimacy.  In 
college  with  me,  though  in  an  earlier  class,  were 
the  son  of  his  boy-companion  and  schoolmate, 
the  late  Doctor  Furness  of  Philadelphia,  —  now 
illustrious  as  the  Shakespearian  scholar  and  edi 
tor,  Doctor  Horace  Furness, — and  his  two  class 
mates,  Charles  Russell  Lowell,  better  known  as 
General  Lowell,  the  nephew  of  the  poet,  who 
died  in  Sheridan's  famous  fight  near  Winchester, 
in  1864,  and  the  late  John  Bancroft,  elder  son 

[31  ] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
of  Bancroft  the  historian.  Emerson  invited  the 
four  of  us  to  dine  with  him  in  Concord  in  May, 
1854,  and  we  visited  the  town  together  for  that 
purpose.  The  occasion  was  a  very  pleasant  social 
one;  but  what  dwells  most  in  my  recollection, 
from  the  oddity  of  the  incident,  is  the  fact  that 
on  our  way  through  the  village  to  the  Emerson 
residence  we  found  the  dead  walls  near  the  old 
tavern  (Middlesex  Hotel)  placarded  with  carica 
tures  and  inscriptions  derogatory  to  Doctor  Bart- 
lett,  the  good  old  physician  who  was  the  lead 
ing  total-abstinence  citizen,  and  who  had  been 
prominent  in  a  recent  closure  of  the  hotel  bar, 
where  liquors  were  dispensed  contrary  to  law.  This 
would  not  have  been  so  noticeable,  were  it  not 
that  among  the  caricatures  and  opprobrious  words 
was  one  great  sheet  attacking  "Rev.  R.  W.  E.," 
who  had  been  a  supporter  of  Doctor  Bartlett  in 
his  procedure.  This  was  the  day,  it  seems,  which 
Doctor  Edward  Emerson,  who  succeeded  Doctor 
Bartlett  for  a  few  years  as  the  village  physician, 
commemorates  in  his  volume,  Emerson  in  Con 
cord,  as  the  only  instance  of  any  incivility  offered 

[  32] 


EMERSON 

to  Emerson  in  the  town  which  he  honored  by 
his  residence  for  nearly  half  a  century.  Doctor 
Emerson  says:— 

"It  was  the  practice  of  the  bar-room  wits  to 
revenge  themselves  for  Doctor  Bartlett's  coura-  \ 
geous  and  sincere  war  upon  their  temple,  by 
lampooning  him  in  doggerel  verse.  One  morning 
there  was  a  sign  hung  out  at  the  Middlesex  stable 
with  inscription  insulting  to  Doctor  Bartlett.  Mr. 
Emerson  came  down  to  the  Post  Office,  stopped 
beneath  the  sign,  read  it,  and  did  not  leave  the 
spot  till  he  had  beaten  it  down  with  his  cane.  In 
the  afternoon  when  I  went  to  school  I  remem 
ber  my  mortification  at  seeing  a  new  board  hang 
ing  there,  with  a  painting  of  a  man  with  a  tall 
hat,  long  nose,  and  hooked  cane  raised  aloft;  and 
lest  the  portrait  might  not  be  recognized,  the 
inscription  ran,  'Rev.  R.  W.  E.  knocking  down 
the  Sign.' " 

As  Edward  Emerson  was  then  but  ten  years 
old,  his  memory  may  be  a  little  at  fault;  for  the 
caricature,  as  I  recall  it,  was  a  rough  charcoal 
sketch,  and  the  Bartlett  inscriptions,  which  had 

[33] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

been  renewed,  were  on  pasteboard,  nailed  to  the 
side  of  the  tavern  stable  which  abutted  on  the 
sidewalk  across  the  "Mill  Dam,"  as  the  short  street 
of  shops  was  then  called,  because  laid  out  over 
what  had  been  the  village  miller's  grist-mill  dam 
in  Revolutionary  days.  Of  course,  we  college  stu 
dents  respected  the  village  lampoon. 

There  had  been  an  earlier  gathering  of  students 
from  Cambridge  in  the  Emerson  drawing-room 
in  October,  1853,  to  listen  to  a  conversation,  in 
which,  I  believe,  Bronson  Alcott  was  the  leader, 
as  he  was  in  May,  1854,  when  a  similar  company 
gathered  there.  Of  this  October  conversation  I 
have  but  a  dim  remembrance,  having  made  no 
record  of  it,  as  I  did  in  the  one  following.  In  May, 
1854,  while  most  of  the  party  went  to  Concord 
by  train,  four  of  us  walked  up  along  the  Cam 
bridge  Turnpike,  and  this  walk  and  the  follow 
ing  talk  I  reported,  a  few  days  later,  in  writing 
Miss  Walker,  then  at  Keene,  New  Hampshire, 
who  was  as  ardent  an  Emersonian  and  Platonist 
as  myself.  It  was  on  a  Saturday,  and  the  record 
runs  thus:  — 

[34] 


EMERSON 

"At  half-past  nine  in  the  morning  we  started 
from  the  Colleges  to  walk  up.  It  was  hot  at  first, 
and  we  went  with  coats  and  cravats  off  until  we 
got  within  two  or  three  miles  of  the  house  of 
'The  Sage,'  as  Frank  Barlow,  who  once  lived  in 
Concord,  calls  Mr.  Emerson.  We  walked  fast, 
through  a  beautiful  country  (Cambridge  and  Lex 
ington  mostly),  on  a  lonely  road,  passing  near  the 
birthplace  of  Theodore  Parker,  and  beguiling  the 
way  with  talk.  The  distance  is  thirteen  miles,  and 
we  were  four  hours  on  the  road.  By  one  o'clock 
our  stomachs  began  to  hint  of  dinner,  and,  as  we 
had  not  been  thoughtful  enough  to  bring  any 
luncheon,  and  there  were  no  taverns  since  stage 
coaches  ceased  to  run  there,  we  fell  to  asking  for 
food  at  the  farm-houses  in  Concord.  Three  times 
we  were  refused;  but  at  last,  within  sight  of  the 
Emerson  house,  we  came  to  an  Irishman's  cot 
tage,  which  had  been  the  home  of  Ellery  Chan- 
ning  ten  years  before,  where  the  woman  of  the 
house  was  busy  painting  her  kitchen  with  her  own 
hands.  We  wished  to  be  able  to  say,  when  ques 
tioned  by  Mr.  Emerson,  that  we  had  dined;  and 

[35] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
as  this  was  our  last  opportunity,  we  urged  our  re 
quest  there;  and,  though  it  was  at  great  incon 
venience  to  herself,  the  good  woman  (Mrs.  Shan 
non)  gave  us  a  meal  of  bread  and  butter  and  milk, 
—the  milk,  she  told  us,  from  the  Emerson  cows. 
We  ate  heartily  with  young  appetites,  while  she 
was  lamenting  she  had  no  better  fare  to  offer. 
'  I  'm  shure,  boys,  it  is  dreadful  that  I  am  so  all  in 
a  mess  here,  with  the  paintin', — and  you  been 
walkin'  so  far,'  said  she  with  the  kindest  of  smiles. 
We  told  her  it  was  all  we  needed, — that  we  were 
going  on  to  Mr.  Emerson's,  a  neighbor  of  hers. 
'Ah  yes!  and  the  best  neighbor  I  ever  had  he  is 
too,' — and  went  on  to  praise  him  in  good  earnest. 
Hawthorne  she  remembered,  two  or  three  years 
back,  when  he  lived  at  the  Wayside ;  but  she  did 
not  speak  so  highly  of  him.  Coming  away,  we  of 
fered  to  pay  her,  but  she  refused,  and  when  we 
were  going  to  give  it  to  her  little  boy,  he  also  re 
fused  the  money.  We  left  it  on  the  table ;  where 
upon  the  lad  said  with  as  much  dignity  as  an  earl 
could  show, '  Mother,  the  gentleman  has  left  some 
money  on  our  table, — I  'm  sure  I  don't  know  what 
it 's  for.'  [  36  ] 


EMERSON 

"By  two  o'clock  we  got  to  Mr.  Emerson's— 
past  the  hour  set  for  the  conversation, — and  it 
began  at  once,  Emerson  being  fond  of  punctual 
ity.  At  first  it  was  about  Cambridge  and  Harvard 
College  and  the  choice  of  a  profession :  Could  lit 
erature  be  a  young  man's  occupation?  Mr.  Emer 
son  said:  'It  has  formerly  been  the  opinion  that 
literature  by  itself  will  not  pay ;  but  it  seems  now 
that  this  omnivorous  passion  for  lectures,  review 
articles,  and  other  things  within  the  capacity  of 
scholars,  has  at  last  made  it  easy  for  a  man  in  Eng 
land  or  America  to  be  a  scholar  and  nothing  else, 
—as  Thomas  Carlyle  is.  All  men  of  power  and 
originality  make  their  own  profession  nowadays,— 
for  example,  Theodore  Parker,  Mr.  Alcott,  here, 
Charles  Brace,  with  his  practical  philanthropy, 
and  even  Albert  Brisbane  of  New  York,  who  be 
lieves  in  stellar  duties,  and  introduced  Fourierism 
into  this  country,  after  aiding  Doctor  Howe  to 
be  released  from  his  Prussian  prison  twenty  years 
ago.  He  told  me  once  that  he  had  the  good  for 
tune  to  silence  Carlyle, — a  great  thing,  if  it  were 
true, — but  Carlyle  may  have  been  only  bored  by 

[37] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
our  countryman,  who  is  a  sad  button-holder.  The 
railway  train  is  the  place  to  talk  with  Brisbane, 
where  time  is  long,  and  at  your  own  disposal.' 
Then  we  talked  of  the  Cambridge  professors,— 
of  Longfellow  and  his  destined  successor,  J.  R. 
Lowell,  who  had  become  acquainted  with  Emer 
son  when  he  was  'rusticated'  from  the  class  of 
1838,  and  studied  in  Concord  with  Reverend  Mr. 
Frost,  the  parish  minister, — and  of  the  Harvard 
system  of  instruction  and  restriction.  Emerson 
thinks  rhetoric  is  now  too  much  neglected  there ;  it 
was  better  taught  under  Professor  Edward  Chan- 
ning,  who  trained  a  whole  generation  to  be  good 
writers,  and  sometimes  good  speakers, — such  as 
Wendell  Phillips.  Something  led  the  talk  toward 
Shakespeare,  and  then  it  became  more  deeply  in 
teresting  to  me.  I  spoke  of  the  deep  mystery  of 
Shakespeare's  genius, — so  much  poetry  and  phi 
losophy  and  dramatic  power,  in  one  of  whose  life 
and  training  we  know  so  little, — quoting  some  of 
the  sayings  of  Emerson  in  Representative  Men. 
Some  one  brought  out  the  curious  fact  that, 
though  he  uses  the  language  of  Christianity  a  few 

[38] 


EMERSON 

times,  as  in  Measure  for  Measure  and  Henry  IV, 
there  is  so  little  Christianity  in  him  you  would 
hardly  guess  from  his  plays  and  poems  that  he 
lived  among  Christians, — and  his  dear  friend  Mar 
lowe  was  denounced  in  his  short  life  as  an  athe 
ist.  Emerson  said  'Shakespeare  was  a  pagan  in 
the  best  sense  of  that  word';  and  quoted  Jones 
Very  (the  religious  devotee,  who  wrote  a  remark 
able  essay  on  Hamlet)  as  saying,  'If  I  can  move 
Shakespeare  I  can  move  the  world, — and  already 
I  begin  to  see  him  shake  a  little.' 

"Mr.  Alcott,  who  was  visiting  Emerson,  his 
home  now  being  in  Boston,  had  sat  in  silence  all 
this  time;  but  now  Mr.  Emerson  asked  his  view 
of  Shakespeare's  religion.  Mr.  Alcott  began  with 
a  Socratic  question, — 'Is  not  the  reason  why  we 
of  this  day  see  no  religion  in  him,  because  he  was 
the  only  religious  man  whom  the  Anglo-Saxon 
race  (not  much  addicted  to  religion)  has  yet  pro 
duced  among  its  writers?  Many  others  have  had 
an  alien  religion, — have  ingrafted  the  Hebrew 
religion  upon  themselves,  as  our  Puritans  did,— 
wherefore  Jewry  yet  leads  us  in  chains.  But  in 

[39] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 
Shakespeare  Jewry  has  no  share;  his  religion  is 
of  the  blood  and  the  race,  and  so  will  only  be  un 
derstood  by  such  as  are  fine  enough  to  appreci 
ate  him  in  this  matter.' 

"This  was  a  thought  wholly  new  to  us  all,  es 
pecially  to  three  or  four  students  of  divinity  from 
the  Hall  where  Emerson  in  1838  gave  his  Divin 
ity  School  Address.  Mr.  Alcott  went  on  to  expand 
his  idea, — that  to  each  race  there  is  a  religion 
given,  peculiarly  its  own,  and  modified  by  its  tem 
perament  and  experiences,  as  was  the  Hebrew 
faith.  But  these  race-religions  are  the  same  in 
their  great  essentials,  and  we  of  the  Anglo-Saxon 
race  are  now  waiting  for  ours.  Emerson  followed 
this  thought  up  by  saying:  'When  we  shall  have 
got  what  every  man  nowadays  is  seeking, — a  Bi 
ble  which  can  unite  the  faiths  of  all  mankind, — - 
Shakespeare's  sayings  will  have  a  large  place  in 
it.  The  ethics  of  Shakespeare  are  vast  and  rich.' 

"This  led  naturally  to  some  talk  on  pulpit 
preachers.  Emerson  said,  'In  Great  Britain  I 
heard  no  preaching  to  compare  with  ours  in 
America;  they  have  no  man  there  like  our  Chan- 

[40] 


EMERSON 

ning,  who  was  the  king  of  preachers.'  He  did  not 
hear  Chalmers,  the  great  Scotch  preacher,  when 
he  was  in  Edinburgh  in  1847-48;  but  had  heard 
Carlyle's  early  friend,  Edward  Irving,  and  posi 
tively  disliked  him.  Again  we  talked  of  poets  and 
other  authors, — of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  the 
English  metaphysicians,  and  of  Charles  Kings- 
ley  and  his  novels,  chiefly  Hypatia.  Mr.  Alcott 
introduced  that  topic;  but  it  seems  Mr.  Emerson 
does  not  admire  Kingsley,  though  he  has  not  read 
him  much.  His  reading  in  novels  is  not  extensive, 
and  he  does  not  always  read  what  Hawthorne 
writes.  Of  poesy  he  said, '  We  do  not  expect  poets 
to  come  from  culture;  they  come  from  Heaven,' 
and  he  proceeded  to  inquire  whom  we  have  seen 
in  college,  thus  sent." 

Our  party  on  this  occasion,  from  Cambridge, 
was  ten  in  number,  of  whom,  after  fifty  years, 
only  three  or  four  survive :  Mr.  B.  S.  Lyman  of 
Philadelphia,  Mr.  James  Hosmer,  the  well-known 
author,  now  of  Minneapolis,  myself,  and  another 
whose  name  escapes  me.  The  latest  to  die  was 
my  dear  friend,  Edwin  Morton,  of  Plymouth,  a 

[41  ] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
townsman  of  Mrs.  Emerson,  a  musician  and  poet, 
who  spent  his  last  quarter-century  in  Switzerland, 
and  died  at  Morges  on  Lake  Geneva  in  1900. 
When  Emerson  asked  that  searching  question 
about  college  poets,  Morton  was  friendly  enough 
privately  to  name  me  as  one ;  whereupon  Emer 
son  expressed  a  wish  to  see  some  of  my  verses, 
with  which  Morton  supplied  him.  They  had  been 
written  at  Exeter,  two  or  three  years  before,  and 
printed  in  a  New  Hampshire  newspaper, — for 
which  I  occasionally  wrote,  from  the  age  of  eigh 
teen, — except  one  poem  called  Patience,  which  a 
partial  friend  had  caused  to  be  printed  in  a  Bos 
ton  journal.  He  had  seen  these  before  this  May 
party,  and  was  good  enough  to  speak  kindly  of 
those  he  had  seen,  and  to  request  me  to  send  him 
others.  He  praised  an  invective  appeal  to  Daniel 
Webster,  urging  him  to  atone  for  his  apostasy 
on  the  slavery  question  of  March  7,  1850,  which 
must  have  been  written  that  year,  before  I  was 
nineteen.  It  was  in  the  iambic  measure  of  Pope 
and  Dryden,  and  was  praised  by  Emerson — for 
what,  I  do  not  now  recall.  Another  was  in  praise 

[42] 


EMERSON 

of  Kossuth,  when  visiting  New  England,  and  was 
written  a  year  or  two  later,  perhaps  about  the 
time  Emerson  was  welcoming  the  Hungarian 
leader  in  April,  1852,  to  the  first  battle-ground 
of  the  Revolution — an  address  now  but  little 
known,  in  which  Emerson  said:— 

"The  people  of  Concord  share  with  their  coun 
trymen  the  admiration  of  valor  and  perseverance ; 
they,  like  their  compatriots,  have  been  hungry  to 
see  the  man  whose  extraordinary  eloquence  is  sec 
onded  by  the  splendor  and  solidity  of  his  actions. 
But,  as  it  is  the  privilege  of  this  town  to  keep  a 
hallowed  mound  which  has  a  place  in  the  story  of 
the  country;  as  Concord  is  one  of  the  monuments 
of  freedom ;  we  knew  beforehand  that  you  could 
not  go  by  us.  You  could  not  take  all  your  steps 
in  the  pilgrimage  of  American  liberty,  until  you 
had  seen  with  your  eyes  the  ruins  of  the  bridge 
where  a  handful  of  brave  farmers  opened  our 
Revolution.  Therefore  we  sat  and  waited  for  you. 
We  think  that  the  graves  of  heroes  around  us 
throb  to-day  with  a  footstep  that  sounded  like 
their  own: — 

[43] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

'The  mighty  tread 
Brings  from  the  dust  the  sound  of  Liberty.' 

Far  be  it  from  us,  Sir,  any  tone  of  patronage;  we 
ought  rather  to  ask  yours.  You,  the  foremost  sol 
dier  of  freedom  in  this  age — it  is  for  us  to  crave 
your  judgment.  Who  are  we  that  we  should  dic 
tate  to  you  ?  You  have  won  your  own.  We  only 
affirm  it.  You  have  earned  your  own  nobility  at 
home.  We  admit  you  ad  eundem,  as  they  say 
at  college.  We  admit  you  to  the  same  degree, 
without  new  trial.  You  may  well  sit  a  doctor  in 
the  college  of  Liberty.  You  have  achieved  your 
right  to  interpret  our  Washington.  And  I  speak 
the  sense  not  only  of  every  generous  American, 
but  the  law  of  mind,  when  I  say  that  it  is  not 
those  who  live  idly  in  the  city  called  after  his 
name,  but  those  who,  all  over  the  world,  think 
and  act  like  him,  who  can  claim  to  explain  the 
sentiment  of  Washington. 

"We  are  afraid  that  you  are  growing  popular, 
Sir;  you  may  be  called  to  the  dangers  of  pros 
perity.  Hitherto  you  have  had  in  all  countries 
and  in  all  parties  only  the  men  of  heart.  I  do  not 

[44] 


EMERSON 

know  but  you  will  have  the  million  yet.  But 
remember  that  everything  great  and  excellent 
in  the  world  is  in  minorities.  Whatever  obstruc 
tion  from  selfishness,  indifference,  or  from  prop 
erty  (which  always  sympathizes  with  possession) 
you  may  encounter,  we  congratulate  you  that 
you  have  known  how  to  convert  calamities  into 
powers,  exile  into  a  campaign,  present  defeat  into 
lasting  victory." 

My  verses,  in  their  small  youthful  way,  ex 
pressed  the  same  sentiment  as  this  master  of  elo 
quence  did  soon  after;  and  they  had  his  approval 
for  that,  if  not  for  their  form.  On  the  Patience 
he  made  this  single  criticism;  it  began 

In  the  high  Heaven,  home  of  endless  glee, 
Sits  a  bright  angel  at  the  Father's  knee; 

upon  which  touch  of  affectation  he  said,  "Your 
use  of  'glee'  and  'knee'  in  the  beginning  was 
hardly  like  Michel  Angelo."  He  remembered 
enough  of  my  versification  two  years  after  to  ask 
me  to  write  for  the  dedication  of  Sleepy  Hollow 
Cemetery  "an  ode  that  can  be  sung,"  and  I  com 
plied.  Twenty  years  later,  in  1875,  he  printed  in 

[45] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
his  Parnassus  this  ode,  and  my  River  Song,  to 
gether  with  two  sonnets  describing  his  daughter 
Ellen,  and  taking  for  their  text  Emerson's  own 
sentence,  addressed,  I  have  heard,  to  Caroline 
Sturgis  amid  her  suitors, — "O  Maiden!  come  into 
port  bravely,  or  sail  with  God  the  seas."  As  my 
verses  described  with  some  fidelity  a  remarkable 
character  among  maidens  of  the  years  before  our 
Civil  War,  I  may  be  pardoned  for  quoting  them. 
The  only  title  I  gave  them,  when  sending  them 
to  Emerson,  being  Anathemata  (Offerings  at  a 
Shrine),  he  asked  me  when  about  to  print  them 
in  his  collection,  what  meaning  I  attached  to  the 
Greek  word,  and  I  gave  that  above. 

I 

With  joys  unknown,  with  sadness  unconfessed, 

The  generous  heart  accepts  the  passing  year, 
Finds  duties  dear,  and  labor  sweet  as  rest, 

And  for  itself  knows  neither  care  nor  fear. 
Fresh  as  the  morning,  earnest  as  the  hour 

That  calls  the  noisy  world  to  grateful  sleep, 
Our  silent  thought  reveres  the  nameless  Power 

That  high  seclusion  round  thy  life  doth  keep  : 
So,  feigned  the  poets,  did  Diana  love 

To  smile  upon  her  darlings  as  they  slept; 

[46] 


EMERSON 

Serene,  untouched,  and  walking  far  above 

The  narrow  ways  wherein  the  many  crept, 
Along  her  lonely  path  of  luminous  air 
She  glided,  of  her  beauty  unaware. 

II 

Yet  if  they  said  she  heeded  not  the  hymn 

Of  shepherds  gazing  heavenward  from  the  moor, 
Or  homeward  sailors,  when  the  waters  dim 

Flashed  with  long  splendors,  widening  toward  the  shore ; 
Nor  wondering  eyes  of  children  cared  to  see; 

Or  glowing  face  of  happy  lover  upturned, 
As  late  he  wended  from  the  trysting-tree, 

Lit  by  the  kindly  lamp  in  heaven  that  burned ; 
And  heard  unmoved  the  prayer  of  wakeful  pain, 

Or  consecrated  maiden's  holy  vow, — 
Believe  them  not !  they  sing  the  song  in  vain ; 

For  so  it  never  was,  and  is  not  now. 
Her  heart  was  gentle  as  her  face  was  fair, 
With  grace  and  love  and  pity  cloistered  there. 

But  to  return  to  our  May  party  (May  20,  1854). 
At  the  close  of  our  formal  conversation,  tea  was 
served  by  Mrs.  Emerson,  after  which  six  of  the 
party  were  taken  by  that  lady  to  her  "pleached 
garden,"  where  she  showed  her  blossoming  flowers, 
and  gave  us  bouquets  of  them.  Near  by  we  saw 
the  famous  Summer  House  built  by  Bronson  Al- 
cott  while  Emerson  was  abroad  in  1847-48,  then 

[47] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
in  good  condition,  with  its  harp-adorned  gable, 
and  its  upper  room,  to  which  you  mounted  by  a 
rustic  stairway,  winding  round  the  west  end,  in 
side  ;  and  which  stood  for  perhaps  ten  years  after 
our  visit,  and  was  sketched  by  Miss  Sarah  Clarke, 
Allston's  one  pupil,  from  the  interior.  It  was  a 
picturesque  addition  to  the  orchard  and  garden. 
Delaying  too  long  in  this  delightful  spot,  we 
lost  our  train  on  the  Fitchburg  railroad,  and,  be 
ing  unable  to  find  a  carriage  to  take  us  to  the 
College  that  evening,  the  six  of  us  separated,— 
Morton  and  Lyman  waiting  for  a  later  train, 
while  Barlow,  Barker,  Carroll,  and  I  walked 
home  down  what  is  now  Massachusetts  Avenue, 
leaving  Barker,  a  divinity  student  (afterwards 
an  army  chaplain),  at  East  Lexington,  where  his 
friend  Clarke  (a  pupil  of  mine  in  Greek)  was  to 
preach  the  next  day  in  Doctor  Follen's  church, 
and  reaching  our  rooms  after  midnight. 

I  have  dwelt  at  some  length  on  this  golden 
day  in  our  college  year,  because  it  illustrates  so 
well  the  unselfish  interest  which  Emerson  took 
in  the  young  men  who  found  in  his  writings  in- 

[48] 


EMERSON 

spiration  and  solace.  We  were  in  a  feeble  minor 
ity, — perhaps  fifty  among  the  five  hundred  who 
then  were  registered  at  Cambridge  as  students 
of  Harvard, — the  medical  students,  of  whom  my 
elder  brother,  the  late  Doctor  C.  H.  Sanborn  of 
New  Hampshire,  was  then  one,  being  lodged  and 
taught  in  Boston  exclusively.  We  could  therefore 
cordially  agree  with  Emerson's  dictum  to  Kos- 
suth, — that  "everything  great  and  excellent  in  the 
world  is  in  minorities."  Among  us  for  a  time  was 
that  Oxford  scholar,  Matthew  Arnold's  "Thyrsis," 
who  had  come  to  New  England  for  relief  from 
the  distresses  and  conformities  of  England,  and 
was  editing  Plutarch  and  teaching  a  few  pupils 
advanced  Greek — among  them  Professor  Good 
win,  now  the  veteran  Greek  scholar  of  America. 
Arthur  Clough  had  a  second  home  at  Emerson's 
house  in  Concord,  but  I  only  met  him  in  Cam 
bridge.  Immediately  after  this  Concord  conver 
sation  came  the  excitement  in  Boston  over  the 
arrest  of  the  fugitive  slave  Anthony  Burns,  and 
I  was  present  at  the  great  meeting  in  Faneuil 
Hall,  where  an  unorganized  attempt  was  made 

[49] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

to  rescue  Burns  from  the  Court  House  near  the 
City  Hall,  where  he  was  confined  under  guard. 
Not  being  informed  of  the  plan  of  rescue,  I  had 
placed  myself  so  near  the  platform  in  the  hall 
that  it  was  impossible  to  get  through  the  crowd 
to  the  door,  and  thence  to  Court  Square,  until 
the  unsuccessful  attack  had  been  made  and  foiled, 
with  one  fatal  wound, — that  given  by  one  of  the 
rescuers  with  a  sword-cane,  unsheathed,  to  Bach- 
elder,  one  of  the  slave's  guard.  As  I  finally  got 
to  the  Court  House  and  ran  up  the  steps,  there 
stood  Mr.  Alcott,  calm  and  brave,  his  cane  under 
his  arm,  ready  to  make  another  attack,  if  needful. 
It  was  the  first  time  I  had  seen  him  since  our 
philosophic  seance  in  Emerson's  drawing-room 
and  study,  a  week  before.  Pressing  personal  duty 
took  me  the  next  day  to  Keene,  whence  I  wrote 
to  Emerson,  May  31,  to  express  our  gratitude  for 
his  courtesies,  but  beginning  with  an  acknowl 
edgment  of  our  mortification  at  being  seen  by 
his  family  on  our  walk  back  to  Cambridge  at 
sunset. 

"We  were  sorry  the  other  night  to  expose  our 
[50] 


EMERSON 

ill-fortune  to  you  by  passing  your  house  on  our 
way  to  Lexington ;  but  there  was  no  other  way ; 
it  turned  out,  however,  to  be  good  fortune — or 
I  thought  it  so.  At  any  rate,  we  could  afford  to 
pay  that  price  for  our  afternoon's  enjoyment, 
which  we  agreed  was  incomparable.  The  whole 
day  was  to  me  one  of  the  greatest  delight.  We 
would  be  glad  to  return  your  hospitality  by  invit 
ing  you  to  Cambridge,  to  meet  there  a  roomful 
of  young  men,  and  pass  the  afternoon  with  us. 
Would  such  an  arrangement  be  agreeable  to  you, 
at  any  time  during  this  term  ?  I  think  you  told 
me  last  year  that  there  was  an  inconvenience  in 
it,  which  may  still  be  the  case.  I  write  this  from 
among  the  Cheshire  hills,  not  far  from  your  Mo- 
nadnoc,  which  I  climbed  our  eastern  hill  this 
morning  to  see.  Coming  here  from  the  conten 
tion  and  noise  of  Boston,  it  seems  like  stepping 
into  a  church — so  still  and  cool  is  it  here." 

It  must  have  been  in  response  to  this  request, 
in  which  Moncure  Con  way  of  Virginia,  then  about 
graduating  from  the  Divinity  School,  cordially 
joined,  that  Emerson  did  visit  Divinity  Hall  in 

[51  ] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
June,  and  read  to  a  score  of  us  in  Conway's  room 
his  lecture  on  Poetry,  which  was  not  printed  till 
many  years  later.  It  was  a  distinguished  audience 
of  our  elder  friends;  for  Arthur  Clough  came, 
shortly  before  his  return  to  England,  Longfellow 
and  his  wife  were  there,  and  Charles  Lowell  came 
with  his  mother,  Mrs.  Anna  Lowell ;  and  proba 
bly  Charles  Norton  and  William  Goodwin  were 
there,  if  in  America,  though  I  do  not  recall  them. 
In  the  conversation  which  followed  the  reading, 
Clough  took  no  marked  part;  he  was  extremely 
modest,  even  shy. 

Many  sad  events  for  me  followed  these  happy 
days  of  May  and  June:  I  was  called  away  to 
Peterboro,  New  Hampshire,  by  the  increasing  ill 
ness  of  Miss  Walker,  to  whom  I  was  engaged ;  and 
this  only  terminated  with  her  death  in  August. 
We  were  married  upon  her  death-bed,  and  I  re 
mained  with  her  aged  and  lonely  father  for  a 
month  or  two,  and  did  not  return  to  college  until 
October.  I  was  invited  to  Concord  by  Emerson 
in  November  (the  twenty-first),  1854,  and  took 
my  first  long  walk  with  him  through  his  Walden 

[52] 


EMERSON 

woodlands,  on  both  sides  of  the  pond — meeting, 
on  our  way  thither,  Thomas  Cholmondeley,  an 
other  Oxford  scholar,  who  had  followed  dough's 
example,  though  for  different  reasons,  and  come 
to  spend  some  months  in  New  England.  He  was 
from  New  Zealand  not  long  before,  whither  he 
had  gone  to  aid  in  the  colonizing  career  of  a  rela 
tive,  had  raised  sheep  there,  and  written  a  book 
about  the  island — Ultima  Thule  by  name.  Emer 
son  introduced  him  to  Thoreau,  at  whose  father's 
house  Cholmondeley  lived  while  in  Concord,  and 
where  he  afterwards  visited  in  1858-59,  during 
the  last  illness  of  John  Thoreau. 

Emerson,  who  had  dined  alone  that  Novem 
ber  day,  was  just  returned  from  a  lecture  in  New 
Hampshire ;  it  being  his  habit  then,  and  for  more 
than  twenty  years  after,  to  give  a  good  part  of 
the  autumn  and  winter  months  to  lecturing  in 
New  England,  New  York,  Canada,  and  the  Mid 
land  States,— then  called  "the  West,"— Ohio, 
Michigan,  Illinois,  and  finally  Wisconsin,  Iowa, 
and  Missouri — going  only  at  intervals  to  New 
Jersey,  Pennsylvania,  and  at  last  to  Washington 

[53] 


THE    PERSONALITY     OF 

and  Virginia,  from  which  his  pronounced  anti- 
slavery  opinions  had  long  excluded  him.  In  these 
tours  he  was  often  absent  from  Concord  weeks  or 
months,  and  encountered  many  interesting  per 
sons.  This  particular  day  he  told  me  of  an  Illinois 
theorist,  Bassnett  by  name,  whom  he  had  met, 
and  whose  book,  Outlines  of  a  Mechanical  Theory 
of  Storms,  Emerson  lent  me.  It  proved  to  be 
totally  at  variance  with  the  Newtonian  system  of 
gravitation,  and,  though  readable  from  its  start 
ling  theses,  very  slenderly  supported  by  the  facts 
of  nature.  It  attached  much  importance  to  lunar 
influences,  exerted,  as  Bassnett  held,  by  means 
of  "a  vorticose  motion  in  the  luminiferous  ether," 
which  he  took  to  be  the  same  thing,  under  an 
other  name,  as  the  electric  fluid.  Emerson  did 
not  accept  his  conclusions,  but  found  the  author 
entertaining,  as  he  often  thought  those  who  break 
a  new  path  in  science,  away  from  the  beaten 
track  of  the  professional  scientist,  whom  he  was 
apt  to  criticise  humorously — as  in  that  first  chap 
ter  of  what  was  to  have  been  his  great  work  on 
The  Natural  History  of  Intellect.  The  page  was 

[54] 


EMERSON 

written,  I  suppose,  before  my  acquaintance  with 
him  began,  perhaps  suggested  by  the  controver 
sies  in  which  his  brother-in-law,  Doctor  Charles 
T.  Jackson,  the  famous  Boston  chemist  and  early 
geologist,  found  himself  involved  from  time  to 
time.  Emerson  there  said:— 

"Go  into  the  scientific  club  and  hearken.  Each 
savant  proves  in  his  admirable  discourse  that  he, 
and  he  only,  knows  now  or  ever  did  know  any 
thing  on  the  subject.  'Does  the  gentleman  speak 
of  Anatomy?  Who  peeped  into  a  box  at  the 
Custom  House  and  then  published  a  drawing  of 
my  rat?'  Poor  Nature  and  the  sublime  law  are 
quite  omitted  in  this  triumphant  vindication. 
Was  it  better  when  we  came  to  the  philosophers 
who  found  everybody  wrong?  acute  and  ingenious 
themselves  to  lampoon  and  degrade  mankind." 

Emerson,  in  all  my  conversations  with  him,  as 
in  his  published  writings,  did  not,  as  Harvey 
scoffingly  said  of  Bacon,  "talk  of  science  like  a 
Lord  Chancellor";  but  held  himself  modestly  a 
listener  at  the  shrine  of  Nature's  oracles,  and  re 
ported  faithfully,  without  ostentation  or  parade, 

[55] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

what  she  said  in  his  hearing.  Already,  before  and 
since  his  death,  foremost  thinkers  in  science  and 
philosophy  have  found  themselves  anticipated  by 
this  subtile  intelligence,  musing  in  the  woods  of 
Concord ;  and  little  that  is  obsolete  or  obsolescent 
appears  in  the  bright  circle  of  his  intellectual  il 
lumination.  Ambitious  systems,  Positive,  Cosmic, 
Psychical,  etc.,  arise  and  vaunt  themselves  for  a 
time,  only  to  be  laid  aside  in  a  few  years;  while 
the  vital,  spiritual  philosophy  of  Emerson  gathers 
strength  by  "years  that  bring  the  philosophic 
mind"  to  those  who  have  been  the  slaves  of  sys 
tem  and  a  dead-and-alive  logic.  "Let  the  stu 
dent,"  he  says  somewhere,  "learn  to  appreciate 
this  miracle  of  the  mind.  He  shall  come  to  know 
that  in  seeing,  and  in  no  tradition,  he  must  find 
what  truth  is;  shall  come  to  trust  it  entirely, — 
to  cleave  to  God  against  the  name  of  God.  When 
he  has  once  known  the  oracle  he  will  need  no 
priest:  He  from  whose  hand  it  came  will  guide 
and  direct  it." 

On  the  Saturday  after  this  Concord  walk  (No 
vember  25,  1854),  I  dined  with  the  Alcotts  at 

[56] 


EMERSON 

their  Pinckney  Street,  Boston,  house,  and  the 
host,  in  his  study  afterwards,  gave  me  this  ac 
count  of  Emerson's  method  of  writing,  which 
was  generally,  but  not  absolutely,  true:— 

"  He  puts  down  in  his  common-place  book  from 
day  to  day,  as  I  do  in  my  Journal,  whatever  he 
thinks  worthy;  and  when  preparing  his  lectures, 
or  writing  or  editing  his  book,  he  goes  over  these 
diaries,  notices  what  topic  has  been  uppermost  in 
his  thought  for  the  time  covered  by  the  writing, 
and  arranges  his  passages  with  reference  to  that. 
Does  this  not  account  for  the  want  of  formal 
method  in  his  works?  They  are  crystallizations  of 
earlier  material.  We  hold  that  a  theology  infused 
into  your  mind,  as  in  Emerson's  books,  is  better 
than  one  more  directly  taught.  The  best  men, 
when  they  teach  theology  directly,  are  wont  to 
get  harsh  and  narrow;  the  indirect  way  is  the 
best." 

But  in  his  style,  apart  from  the  subtler  mean 
ings,  Emerson  was  direct  enough,  and  did  not 
tolerate  in  others  what  he  avoided  for  himself. 
At  this  same  date,  Mr.  Alcott  showed  me  the 

[57] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

letter  of  Emerson,  written  more  than  a  dozen 
years  before,  criticising  sincerely  the  language  of 
his  friend  in  that  mystical  reverie  of  his  which 
he  called  Psyche,  but  which  he  never  printed: — 
"I  think  it  possesses,  in  certain  passages,  the 
rare  power  to  awaken  the  highest  faculties, — to 
waken  the  apprehension  of  the  Absolute.  It  is  al 
most  uniformly  elegant,  and  contains  many  beau 
tiful  and  some  splendid  pages.  Its  fault  arises 
out  of  the  subtlety  and  extent  of  its  subject;  it 
grapples  with  an  Idea  which  it  does  not  subdue 
and  present  in  just  method  before  us.  The  book 
has  a  strong  mannerism.  But  its  capital  fault  is  a 
want  of  compression, — a  fault  almost  unavoid 
able  in  treating  such  a  subject, — which  not  be 
ing  easily  apprehensible  by  the  human  faculties, 
we  are  tempted  to  linger  round  the  Idea,  in  the 
hope  that  what  cannot  be  sharply  stated  in  a 
few  words,  may  yet  chance  to  be  suggested  by 
many.  .  .  .  The  prophet  should  speak  a  clear  dis 
course,  straight  home  to  the  conscience ;  but  your 
page  is  often  a  series  of  touches.  You  play  with 
the  thought, — never  strip  off  your  coat,  and  dig 

[58] 


EMERSON 

and  strain,  and  drive  into  the  heart  of  the  matter. 
See  what  a  style  yours  is  to  balk  and  disappoint 
expectation !  To  use  a  coarse  word,  't  is  all  stir  and 
no  go.  If  there's  a  good  thing,  say  it  out!  there 
are  so  few  in  the  world,  we  can't  wait  a  minute. 
*  Gaberdine'  we  have  had  before;  say  *  frock.' 
'Lunch'  is  vulgar,  and  reminds  one  of  the  Bite 
Tavern"  (in  Boston). 

"If  there  is  one  thing  more  than  another,"  said 
Alcott  once,  "that  we  should  pray  for,  it  is  the 
boon  of  a  severely  candid  friend."  Such  did  he 
and  others  find  in  Emerson;  as  those  who  knew 
him  most  intimately  would  all  witness.  And  his 
censures  were  so  friendly  that,  where  criticism  of 
writings  was  concerned,  he  was  entitled  to  the 
praise  Pope  gave  to  the  fair  Belinda:  — 

"Who  oft  rejects,  but  never  once  offends." 

A  week  after  this  visit  to  the  Alcotts,  I  met  with 
Emerson,  Alcott,  Cholmondeley,  John  Dwight, 
the  musical  appreciator,  George  Calvert,  who 
had  lived  in  Germany  with  William  Emerson, 
and  others,  at  an  Albion  dinner  in  Boston,  and 

[59] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
the  conversation  turned  on  literary  matters  and 
authors.  Emerson  was  in  full  force,  and  praised 
and  blamed  with  equal  sincerity.  He  urged  Mr. 
D wight  to  print,  as  a  publishing  venture,  the 
then  new  novel  of  Christie  Johnstone  by  Charles 
Reade;  it  ought  to  be  printed  in  Boston,  for  it 
was  much  better  than  Jane  Eyre.  It  was  soon 
after  published  by  Mr.  Fields,  of  the  firm  of 
Tick  nor.  George  Bancroft,  whose  son  John  had 
lately  graduated  at  Harvard,  his  father's  col 
lege,  was  mentioned,  in  connection  with  an  ad 
dress  he  had  recently  given  in  New  York,  in 
which  he  lauded  Calvinism,  and  larded  his  page 
with  phrases  like  "Arrogant  Arius,"  "Devout 
Athanasius,"  and  the  "Triune  God"- -Bancroft 
being  a  Unitarian,  if  anything,  in  religion.  Emer 
son,  who  had  first  met  Bancroft  as  a  Senior  in 
Harvard,  in  1818,  and  who  had  known  him  well 
almost  ever  since,  told  us:  — 

"Mr.  Bancroft  is  hardly  a  religious  man:  his 
Trinitarianism  was  perhaps  assumed  out  of  def 
erence  to  the  sentiment  of  New  York,  where  he 
now  lives,  and  which  is  mainly  Presbyterian  and 

[60] 


EMERSON 

Episcopalian.  In  conversation  he  will  take  any 
side,  and  defend  it  skilfully ;  he  is  a  soldier  of  for 
tune,  as  we  see  by  his  political  connection.  His 
profession  of  Jacksonian  democracy  in  Boston, 
where  he  was  ostracized  for  it,  was  rewarded  by 
appointment  to  office;  but  Boston  should  have 
been  more  tolerant  of  political  differences.  As 
American  minister  in  London  he  was  a  credit  to 
our  country;  and  his  speech  some  years  earlier, 
at  a  Phi  Beta  dinner  in  Cambridge,  where  Lord 
Ashburton,  who  negotiated  with  Webster  the 
Maine  Boundary  treaty,  was  feted,  was  the  best 
of  the  oratory  on  that  occasion.  The  elder  Quincy 
and  Judge  Story  had  spoken,  but  rather  coldly 
and  stiffly;  but  Bancroft  warmed  up  the  audi 
ence.  Edward  Everett  was  not  present,  having 
preceded  Bancroft,  under  Tyler's  presidency,  as 
minister  to  Saint  James's." 

Soon  after  Mr.  Alcott  came  into  the  Albion 
dining-room,  he  being  the  oldest  person  present, 
though  only  fifty-five  at  that  time,  our  conversa 
tion  turned  on  old  age;  and  Mr.  D wight  said  he 
could  not  understand  why,  in  this  earthly  course 

[61  ] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
of  ours,  youth  must  be  left  behind.  "That  is,  in 
deed,  incomprehensible  and  sad,"  said  Emerson; 
"this  man  here"  (turning  toward  Alcott)  "used 
to  assure  us, — what  every  day's  experience  is  dis 
proving, — that  the  beauty  of  youth  turned  in 
ward."  "I  have  the  trick,"  he  added,  "of  believing 
every  man  I  talk  with,  whatever  his  age,  to  be  at 
least  as  old  as  myself;  so  I  warn  you  all,  young 
men."  The  point  then  in  question  was  the  age  of 
Charles  Sumner,  who  had  succeeded  Daniel  Web 
ster  in  the  Senate  at  Washington.  As  we  left  the 
Albion,  I  walked  with  Alcott  and  Cholmondeley 
to  the  bookstore  of  James  Munroe  on  Washing 
ton  Street,  who  had  been  Emerson's  publisher  for 
some  years,  and  who  had  published  Ellery  Chan- 
ning's  first  volumes  of  poems,  which  Cholmonde 
ley,  who  had  met  Channing  at  Concord,  wished  to 
purchase  and  take  back  to  Shropshire  with  him. 
Munroe  himself  was  at  the  shop,  and,  being  ques 
tioned,  told  us  that  three-fourths  of  all  Ameri 
can  poetry  was  then  published  at  the  poet's  ex 
pense.  This  was  true  of  Emerson's  volume  of  1847, 
and  Channing's  poems  of  the  same  year;  his  first 

[62] 


EMERSON 

volume,  issued  by  Munroe  in  1843,  was  paid  for 
by  Channing's  friend,  S.  G.  Ward.  It  seems  that 
the  custom  of  poetry-printing  has  not  much  va 
ried  since  1854;  in  spite  of  the  popular  success  of 
Longfellow,  Holmes,  and  Whittier,  and  finally  of 
Lowell  and  Whitcomb  Riley. 

December  12,  1854,  Mr.  Alcott  came  out  to 
our  College  to  call  on  Morton  and  myself,  and  we 
went  together  to  Morton's  room  in  Massachusetts 
Hall,  where  we  found  him  writing  his  paper  on 
Thoreau,  which  I  printed  for  him  in  the  Harvard 
Magazine  for  January.  This  led  Alcott  to  talk  of 
Thoreau:— 

"It  is  a  pity  that  he  and  Emerson  live  in  the 
same  age;  both  are  original,  but  they  borrow  from 
each  other,  being  so  near  in  time  and  space.  Rich 
ard  Dana  says  he  has  not  read  Thoreau,  but  al 
ways  supposed  him  to  be  a  man  of  abstractions. 
On  the  contrary,  your  old  Librarian  in  the  Col 
lege,  Doctor  Harris,  told  me  with  a  groan,  'If 
Emerson  had  not  spoiled  him,  Thoreau  would 
have  made  a  good  entomologist.'" 

This  same  month  of  December,  in  my  Senior 
[63] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
college  year,  proved  to  be  full  of  serious  events 
in  my  youthful  life.  Toward  the  end  of  it  my 
father-in-law,  worn  down  with  age  and  sorrow, 
felt  his  death  approaching,  and  I  was  sent  for 
to  be  with  him  in  the  last  hours.  On  my  way 
thither  (to  Peterboro  in  New  Hampshire)  I  passed 
through  Boston  and  bade  farewell  to  our  friend 
Cholmondeley,  who  hastily  decided  to  go  home 
and  raise  a  company  of  volunteers  for  the  Crimean 
War — as  he  did.  And  it  was  in  this  month  that 
Emerson  formed  the  purpose  of  inviting  me  to 
take  charge  of  a  small  school  in  Concord,  mainly 
devoted  to  his  children  and  those  of  Judge  Hoar 
and  his  neighbors,  in  a  schoolhouse  built  by  the 
Judge,  and  not  far  from  his  father's  house — Hon 
orable  Samuel  Hoar's,  who  had  married  a  daugh 
ter  of  Roger  Sherman,  and  was,  in  my  time,  that 
Dantesque  figure  in  the  village  streets  which  none 
could  see  without  respect.  At  his  death,  in  No 
vember,  1856,  Emerson  wrote  his  eulogy,  and 
adorned  it  with  a  quatrain  of  his  verse,  which  I 
have  in  its  first  form — perhaps  not  inferior  to 
that  which  the  poet  afterwards  printed:— 

[64] 


EMERSON 

"  With  beams  that  stars  at  Christmas  dart 

His  cold  eyes  truth  and  conduct  scanned ; 
July  was  in  his  sunny  heart, 
October  in  his  liberal  hand." 

Here  the  allusion  to  Christmas  suggests  the  old- 
fashioned  religion  of  this  aged  Christian,  a  true 
follower  of  Emerson's  grandfather,  Parson  Ripley. 
It  was  after  one  of  his  lectures  in  East  Boston, 
but  whether  in  December  or  January  I  am  not 
certain,  that  Emerson  proposed  to  me  this  task, 
or  rather  privilege,  of  educating  his  children  and 
their  playmates.  I  had  gone  with  a  few  of  my 
classmates,  among  whom  I  remember  Willard 
Bliss,  now  of  Rosemond,  Illinois,  to  hear  him  read 
one  chapter  in  his  forthcoming  English  Traits  to 
a  small  audience  in  that  island  ward  of  Boston. 
At  the  close,  as  we  came  forward  to  express  our 
pleasure  at  the  reading,  he  said  to  me,  after  a  few 
words  to  my  comrades,  "Will  you  get  into  my 
carriage,  and  let  me  take  you  to  the  American 
House  in  Hanover  Street,  where  I  pass  the  night?" 
I  accepted  the  favor,  and,  while  we  crossed  the 
East  Boston  ferry,  he  unfolded  to  me  the  plan  he 

[65] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
had  formed.  I  was  to  get  leave  of  absence  from 
college,  and  open  the  little  school  in  March;  its 
duties  would  not  keep  me  from  pursuing  the  Se 
nior  studies  in  their  last  three  months,  and  I  was 
then  to  continue  the  school  after  graduation,  if 
mutually  satisfactory.  The  salary  offered,  though 
not  large,  was  ample  for  my  single  needs,  and 
might  be  increased  if  the  school  grew  in  numbers, 
as  he  was  kind  enough  to  say  it  would,  under  my 
direction.  I  was  to  have  a  month  or  six  weeks  to 
make  my  decision  and  arrangements;  and  when 
I  found  that  my  kinsman  by  marriage,  President 
Walker,  then  at  the  head  of  the  College,  would 
let  my  studies  go  on  at  Concord,  I  lost  no  time  in 
deciding  to  take  the  place  offered.  Early  in  March, 
1855,  I  visited  the  village,  to  call  on  the  families 
of  my  expected  pupils,  and  to  secure  rooms  for 
myself  and  my  sister,  who,  I  stipulated,  should 
be  my  assistant,  at  my  own  expense.  Emerson 
escorted  me  on  these  visits ;  and  when  I  asked  him 
where  I  could  find  rooms,  he  said,  "Mr.  Ellery 
Channing  has  a  large  old  house,  with  no  inmates 
but  himself  and  his  housekeeper;  we  will  go  and 

[66] 


EMERSON 

see  if  he  will  take  you  in."  We  went  to  the  house, 
opposite  the  residence  of  the  Thoreau  family; 
knocked,  and  were  answered  by  Mr.  Channing  in 
person,  wearing  the  oldest  dressing-gown  I  had 
seen  up  to  that  time  (I  have  since  seen  him  come 
down  to  tea  in  an  older  one  in  my  own  house), 
who  received  us  courteously,  and  was  willing  to 
lease  me  three  furnished  rooms,  and  to  allow  the 
service  of  his  housekeeper,  who  was  rather  his 
tenant  than  his  servant.  That  point  settled,  and 
the  terms  agreed  on,  I  returned  to  take  tea  with 
the  Emersons,  and  a  week  later  began  my  school 
with  seventeen  pupils,  girls  and  boys  together 
(always  the  Concord  custom),  three  of  whom  were 
Emerson's  own  children. 

Having  no  previous  experience  with  a  school, 
though  I  had  taught  Latin  and  Greek  pupils  pri 
vately,  much  margin  and  courtesy  must  be  al 
lowed  for  my  mistakes;  but  I  received  from  all 
the  families  the  kindest  consideration,  and  was  at 
home  in  the  village  and  the  woods  from  the  first. 
One  of  our  earliest  callers  was  Henry  Thoreau, 
whom  I  had  met  at  Emerson's ;  and  with  his  close 

[67] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
friend,  C  banning,  I  became  very  intimate.  I  was 
soon  introduced  at  the  Old  Manse,  then  occupied 
by  that  gentle  scholar  and  excellent  housekeeper 
Mrs.  Sarah  Ripley,  the  widow  of  Reverend  Sam 
uel  Ripley,  Emerson's  half-uncle,  and  her  daugh 
ters,  all  agreeable  ladies,  of  much  culture.  From 
that  acquaintance  to  weekly  Greek  readings  with 
Mrs.  Ripley  was  but  an  easy  step,  and  thus  my 
interest  in  that  language  was  kept  up.  My  college 
studies  came  out  well;  indeed,  though  I  valued 
class-rank  but  little,  I  believe  my  "marks"  were 
higher,  from  infrequent  examinations,  than  if  I 
had  been  at  the  daily  recitations ;  and  I  graduated 
seventh  in  a  class  of  eighty. 

This  is  a  good  place  to  pause  and  speak  of  the 
scholarship  of  Emerson  and  his  Concord  friends. 
He  entered  Harvard  at  the  age  of  fourteen,  and 
graduated  at  eighteen,  in  1821.  In  those  days,  and 
with  his  slender  constitution,  this  did  not  im 
ply  much  reading  either  in  Latin  or  Greek,  and 
French  was  then  but  little  taught.  In  his  own 
school-keeping,  for  a  few  years  after  graduation, 
and  in  his  theological  studies,  Emerson  extended 

[68] 


EMERSON 

his  use  of  Latin,  and  acquired  both  classic  and 
New  Testament  Greek  so  as  to  read  it  with  little 
difficulty;  but  his  familiarity  with  the  language 
was  never  so  great  as  Mrs.  Ripley's,  or  (I  fancy) 
Miss  Hoar's,  who  had  been  better  taught  and 
more  diligent  in  reading  the  originals.  But  from 
the  Attic  cast  of  his  genius,  Emerson  entered  into 
the  spirit  of  Greek  thought  and  literature  more 
profoundly  than  many  better-equipped  technical 
scholars — more  even  than  Thoreau,  who  was  a 
thorough  Greek  and  Latin  scholar.  Emerson  early 
acquired  French,  both  for  reading  and  speak 
ing,  though  not  very  fluent  in  conversation  in 
French.  German  he  learned  later,  for  the  sole  pur 
pose  of  reading  Goethe  in  the  original.  Italian 
he  read,  and  had  some  knowledge  of  Spanish. 
Persian  and  Sanscrit  he  never  attempted;  but 
made  his  translations  from  the  German  version 
of  Oriental  authors,  or  such  English  or  French 
versions  as  were  more  accessible.  Alcott  read  no 
language  but  his  own  and  a  little  French;  but 
Channing  was  versed  in  Latin,  Greek,  and  all  the 
modern  tongues  of  Europe,  though  not  critically 

[69] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 
a  scholar.  The  same  could  be  said  of  Margaret 
Fuller,  whom  I  never  knew. 

Emerson  had  at  all  times  the  habit  of  a  scholar, 

( 

but  one  who,  like  Wordsworth,  made  the  open 
air  his  library  much  of  the  time.  Though  not  so 
thorough  a  walker  and  investigator  of  nature  as 
his  friends,  Channing  and  Thoreau,  who  would 
spend  whole  days  and  nights  in  the  forest  or 
among  the  mountains,  he  had  similar  tastes,  and 
in  youth  had  much  practised  upon  the  scale  they 
afterwards  followed.  When  I  once  remarked  to 
him  that  the  passage  in  his  Woodnotes, 

"And  such  I  knew,  a  forest-seer, 
A  minstrel  of  the  natural  year,"  etc.) 

was  generally  thought  to  be  aimed  at  Henry 
Thoreau,  Emerson  rather  sharply  negatived  that 
notion,  and  told  me  the  whole  remarkable  pas 
sage  was  conceived,  largely  from  his  own  experi 
ence,  and  mainly  written  out,  before  he  ever  knew 
Thoreau,  except  as  a  promising  boy.  He  was  fa 
miliar  with  the  near  forests  of  Maine  and  New 
Hampshire,  and  had  early  seen  the  forest  scenery 
of  the  Carolinas  and  Florida.  In  later  life,  when 

[70] 


EMERSON 

I  first  knew  him,  his  custom  was  to  walk  every 
day  for  some  hours,  and  in  these  walks  I  was 
first  made  acquainted  with  several  of  his  favorite 
haunts  in  Concord:  the  Walden  woods,  Baker 
Farm,  Copan,  and  Peter's  Field,  leading  there 
to,  Columbine  Rock, — one  of  several  crags  thus 
named, — and  the  Estabrook  country.  He  had 
composed  much  of  his  verse  in  these  walks  in 
field  and  woodland,  as,  indeed,  the  verse  itself 
sometimes  declares;  and  his  friends  were  often 
invited  to  join  him  in  his  excursions,  or  to  show 
him  their  favorite  resorts.  Alcott  enjoyed  the 
converse  thus  promoted,  but  hardly  the  walk  it 
self;  for  Emerson  told  me,  whenever  they  came  to 
a  farmer's  fence  or  a  convenient  seat,  his  friend 
would  halt,  to  continue  their  philosophic  debate 
at  rest.  Alcott,  at  eighty-two,  thus  described  in 
his  Sonnets  and  Canzonets  these  early  walks,  forty 
years  before:— 

"  Pleased  I  recall  those  hours  so  fair  and  free, 
When,  all  the  long  forenoons,  we  two  did  toss 
From  lip  to  lip,  in  lively  colloquy, 
Plato,  Plotinus,  or  famed  Schoolman's  gloss, — 
Disporting  in  rapt  thought  and  ecstasy ; 

[71  ] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

Then  by  the  tilting  rail  Millbrook  we  cross, 
And  sally  through  the  fields  to  Walden  wave, 
There  plunging  in  the  Cove,  or  swimming  o'er. 
Through  wood  paths  wending,  he  with  gesture  quick 
Rhymes  deftly  in  mid-air  with  circling  stick, 
Skims  the  smooth  pebbles  from  the  leafy  shore, 
Or  deeper  ripples  raises  as  we  lave." 

These  lines  well  picture  Emerson's  habit  of  fore 
noons  in  the  study  and  afternoons  in  the  woods, 
together  with  his  manner  of  twirling  his  walking- 
stick,  customarily  carried,  and  his  fondness  for 
swimming  in  Walden,  or  skating  there  in  winter. 
I  have  so  skated  with  him,  and  have  swum  there 
with  Alcott,  when  he  was  approaching  his  eigh 
tieth  birthday.  The  Concord  authors,  except  Tho- 
reau,  who  inherited  a  tendency  to  consumption 
and  had  weakened  his  frame  by  outdoor  hard 
ships,  were  robust  comrades  as  I  knew  them ;  for 
Emerson,  in  his  first  Atlantic  voyage,  to  Sicily, 
in  1833,  was  said  to  have  overcome  his  early  ten 
dency  to  phthisis,  of  which  his  brothers  died.  He 
was  not  expert  at  manual  labors,  as  Alcott,  Chan- 
ning,  and  Thoreau  were,  and  for  that  reason  em 
ployed  them  occasionally  in  such  tasks:  Tho- 

[72] 


EMERSON 

reau  in  his  gardening  and  tree-planting,  Channing 
in  wood-cutting,  from  which  experience  came 
Channing's  poem  The  Woodman,  printed  in  his 
Poems  of  Sixty-five  Years,  and  Alcott  in  choos 
ing  crooked  sticks  and  making  a  summer  house 
of  them, — for  which  quaint  task,  satirized  by 
Channing  and  Thoreau  in  their  letters  to  Emer 
son  in  England,  he  was  paid  fifty  dollars. 

Emerson's  relations  with  Alcott  are  to  the  last 
ing  honor  of  both.  Each  saw  the  defect  of  the 
other;  but  Emerson,  aware,  as  few  others  could 
be,  of  the  profound  originality  of  Alcott's  mind 
and  the  nobility  of  his  character,  at  which  the 
worldly  mocked,  and  even  friendship  sometimes 
wearied,  never  failed  to  stand  by  his  friend,  while 
dealing  frankly  with  his  foibles.  He  said  to  me, 
more  than  once,  "I  hope  it  may  please  the 
Powers  to  let  me  survive  Alcott,  and  write  his 
biography;  for  I  think  I  can  do  that  better  than 
any  one."  It  was  not  so  ordered,  and  the  task  of 
biographer  fell  mainly  to  me ;  for  Louisa  Alcott 
died  but  a  day  or  two  after  her  father.  I  then  re 
minded  Doctor  Emerson  of  what  his  father  had 

[73] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
told  me  of  the  records  he  had  made  of  Alcott's 
traits  and  felicities,  and  he  was  good  enough  to 
copy  out  for  me,  from  the  diaries,  most  of  the 
entries  that  concerned  Alcott.  Among  them  was 
this  statement  of  the  intrinsic  manliness  of  char 
acter  which  makes  the  attraction  of  some  literary 
men,  and  which  Emerson,  like  Carlyle,  recognized 
in  Doctor  Johnson:— 

"The  attitude  is  the  main  thing.  John  Brad- 
shaw,  as  Milton  says,  was  all  his  life  a  consul 
sitting  in  judgment  on  kings.  Carlyle,  best  of 
all  men  in  England,  has  kept  this  manly  atti 
tude  in  his  time.  His  errors  of  opinion  are  as 
nothing  in  comparison  with  this  merit,  in  my 
opinion.  If  I  look  for  a  counterpart  in  my  neigh 
borhood,  Thoreau  and  Alcott  are  the  best;  and 
in  majesty  Alcott  excels.  This  aplomb  cannot  be 
mimicked." 

Had  Emerson  looked  in  his  mirror,  he  would 
have  seen  the  face  of  as  marked  an  example  of 
this  quality  as  Alcott  was — yet  not  so  majestic 
in  aspect,  nor  so  graceful  in  manners.  Our  friend 
Cholmondeley  said  of  Alcott,  "He  has  the  man- 

[74] 


EMERSON 

ners  of  a  very  great  Peer"-—  the  highest  compli 
ment  an  English  Squire  could  pay.  As  Ben  Jon- 
son  said  of  Bacon,  "  In  his  adversity  I  ever  prayed 
that  God  would  give  him  strength,  for  greatness 
he  could  not  want";  so  might  his  friends  have 
said  of  Bronson  Alcott.  Emerson  stood  ready  to 
aid  him  in  every  available  way;  yet  said  of  him, 
"With  his  hatred  of  labor  and  his  command 
ing  contemplation,  a  haughty  beneficiary,  Alcott 
makes  good  to  this  nineteenth  century  Simeon 
the  Stylite,  the  Thebais,  and  the  first  Capuchins." 
This  hatred  of  labor  was  only  of  intellectual  la 
bor;  for  Alcott,  like  many  men  brought  up  on 
ancestral  acres  in  New  England,  had  a  real  love 
of  manual  toil,  and  often  exhausted  himself  with 
it  in  his  old  age,  when  Louisa's  success  had  made 
hand-labor  needless  at  the  Orchard  House,  which 
Emerson  had  helped  him  purchase.  Yet  there  was 
a  certain  humorous  truth,  as  often  in  Emerson's 
compliments,  in  another  entry  in  the  diary  about 
1840,  when  his  friend  was  supporting  himself  by 
day-labor  in  the  Concord  grain-fields:— 

"Alcott  astonishes  by  the  grandeur  of  his  angle 
[75] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
of  vision,  and  the  heaps  of  particulars.  I  tell  him 
he  is  the  Bonaparte  of  speculators  [speculative 
philosophers],  born  to  rout  the  Austrians  of  the 
soul.  But  his  day-labor  has  a  certain  emblematic 
air,  like  the  annual  plowing  of  the  Emperor  of 
China." 

Ten  years  or  more  after  my  early  weeks  in 
Concord,  I  was  present  at  a  conversation  of  Al- 
cott's  which  drew  from  Emerson  these  comments 
in  his  diary  (1866):- 

44  Last  night  in  the  conversation  Alcott  ap 
peared  to  great  advantage,  and  I  saw  again,  as 
often  before,  his  singular  superiority.  As  pure  in 
tellect  I  have  never  seen  his  equal.  The  people 
with  whom  he  talks  do  not  ever  understand  him. 
They  interrupt  him  with  clamorous  dissent,  or 
what  they  think  verbal  endorsement  of  what  they 
fancy  he  may  have  been  saying;  or  with  'Do 
you  know,  Mr.  Alcott,  I  think  so  and  so,' — some 
whim  or  sentimentalism ;  and  do  not  know  that 
they  have  interrupted  his  large  and  progressive 
statement;  do  not  know  that  all  they  have  in 
their  baby  brains  is  incoherent  and  spotty;  that 

[76] 


EMERSON 

all  he  sees  and  says  is  like  astronomy,  lying  there 
real  and  vast — and  every  part  and  fact  in  eternal 
connection  with  the  whole ;  and  that  they  ought 
to  sit  in  silent  gratitude,  eager  only  to  hear  more, 
—to  hear  the  whole,  and  not  interrupt  him  with 
their  prattle.  His  activity  of  mind  is  shown  in 
the  perpetual  invention  and  felicity  of  his  lan 
guage  ;  the  constitutionality  of  his  thought  is  ap 
parent  in  the  fact  that  last  night's  discourse  only 
brought  out  with  new  conviction  the  fundamental 
thoughts  which  he  had  when  I  first  knew  him. 
The  moral  benefit  of  such  a  mind  cannot  be  told." 
To  this  high  conception  of  Alcott's  character 
and  intellect  Emerson  was  faithful  to  the  last, 
and  Alcott  was  one  of  the  friends  to  whom  he 
bade  a  characteristic  farewell  on  his  death- bed 
in  1882.  Recalled  for  a  few  moments  from  that 
wandering  of  mind  which  prevailed  in  the  last 
days,  he  grasped  Alcott's  hand  warmly,  saying, 
"You  have  a  strong  hold  on  life;  be  firm!"  It 
was  true,  but  the  weight  of  years  and  the  loss  of 
his  best  friend  weakened  that  hold,  and  it  was 
but  six  months  after  Emerson's  death  that  the 

[77] 


THE    PERSONALITY     OF 
illness  of  which  he  died  six  years  later  fell  upon 
the  vigorous  frame  of  Alcott. 

One  of  the  first  of  Emerson's  volumes  which  I 
read  in  youth  was  that  reprint  of  Nature,  Ad 
dresses  and  Lectures  appearing  in  the  summer 
of  1849,  and  directly  followed  by  Representative 
Men  later  in  the  year.  While  these  books  were 
going  through  the  press  in  Boston,  Alcott  had  fre 
quent  colloquies  with  Emerson  on  their  theories 
of  "Genesis"  (as  Alcott  styled  what  is  now  termed 
Evolution),  and  one  of  the  most  distinct  expres 
sions  of  the  evolutionary  theory  was  handed  by 
Emerson  to  Alcott  in  August,  1849, — who  pasted 
into  his  diary  the  remarkable  verse,  about  to  be 
used  as  the  new  motto  for  Nature: — 

te  A  subtle  chain  of  countless  rings 
The  next  unto  the  farthest  brings ; 
The  eye  reads  omens  where  it  goes, 
And  speaks  all  languages  the  Rose ; 
And,  striving  to  be  man,  the  worm 
Mounts  through  all  the  spires  of  form." 

How  much  earlier  this  was  written  is  yet  un 
known;  but  it  was  the  conclusion  to  which  Emer 
son  had  been  coming  for  a  dozen  years,  helped  by 

[78] 


EMERSON 

the  discoveries  and  theories  of  Oken,  Goethe,  and 
Swedenborg.  In  1855,  when  I  was  one  day  with 
Emerson  in  his  study,  he  read  me  these  lines, 
and  asked  me  how  I  should  interpret  them: — 

"Caught  among  the  blackberry  vines, 
Feeding  on  the  Ethiops  sweet, 
Pleasant  fancies  overtook  me. 
I  said,  fWhat  influence  me  preferred, 
Elect,  to  dreams  thus  beautiful?' 
The  vines  replied,  '  And  did'st  thou  deem 
No  wisdom  to  our  berries  went?'" 

I  hardly  knew  what  to  reply,  where  several  mean 
ings  were  possible;  but  said  that  he  must  have 
meant  that  Nature  does  not  leave  her  least  par 
ticle  without  a  lesson  for  Man ;  that  the  moral  of 
the  delicious  flavor  of  the  low  blackberry  was, 
"Even  so,  what  seems  black  to  you  in  Man's  des 
tiny  may  have  as  fair  an  issue ;  as  Cowper  says  :— 

"The  bud  may  have  a  bitter  taste, 
But  sweet  will  be  the  flower." 

Without  commenting  on  this,  it  seemed  to  please 
him;  and  I  inferred  it  was  an  illustration  of  his 
philosophic  principle:— 

"The  eye  reads  omens  where  it  goes." 

[79  ] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
It  may  have  been  this  incident  that  determined 
me,  the  next  year,  to  set  my  advanced  class  of 
girls  reading  Emerson's  Poems  of  1847,  then  but 
little  known,  and  commenting  on  them  myself, 
by  way  of  interpretation.  This  was,  so  far  as  I 
know,  the  first  example  of  what  has  since  become 
a  frequent  practice,  in  which  my  friend  Charles 
Malloy  of  Waltham  is  a  past  master ;  he  being  an 
older  Emersonian  than  myself.  Emerson  seldom 
commented  his  own  verses,  except  by  way  of  cor 
rection  of  a  mistaken  reading;  and,  like  all  poets, 
he  did  not  always  know  which  the  best  word  was. 
Thus,  when  he  read  me  that  fine  group  of  poems 
which,  at  much  urgency  on  their  part,  he  gave  to 
the  beginners  of  The  Atlantic  Monthly  for  their 
first  number,  the  best  of  them  all,  Days,  began  :— 

"Daughters  of  Time,  the  hypocritic  Days;" 

and  so  he  printed  it  in  The  Atlantic,  a  year  after 
wards.  But  when  he  afterwards  printed  it,  the  be 
ginning  shocked  me  with  its 

"Damsels  of  Time." 

Now  "damsels"  is  a  good  word  in  some  connec- 

[80] 


EMERSON 

tions,  but  not  in  a  grave,  finished  Greek  epigram, 
which  this  poem  is;  just  as  Thoreau's  Smoke  is, 
—graceful  as  Meleager,  and  profound  as  Simoni- 
des.  The  better  reading  is  now  restored  in  the 
posthumous  volume  of  Poems.  But  omissions  oc 
curred  there  which  I  cannot  quite  understand. 
In  that  strangely  admirable  Woodnotes  a  slight 
change  is  made  in  the  lines, 

"He  shall  see  the  speeding  year 
Without  wailing,  without  fear," 

by  altering  "see"  to  "meet"-  —perhaps  to  make  it 
less  apparently  a  version  (a  much  improved  one) 
of  those  lines  of  Horace  which  Emerson  once  told 
me  were  the  grandest  of  that  smiling  poet:— 

" Hunc  solem  et  Stellas  et  decedentia  certis 
Tempora  momentis,  sunt  qui,formidine  nulla 
Imbuti,  spectent" 

(Epistle  VI.  To  Numicius.) 

Horace  gave  us  the  majestic  Lucretian  rhythm, 
and,  like  Dante,  introduced  the  stars  effectively; 
but  the  pith  of  the  passage  is  in  Emerson's  short 
couplet.  It  might  be  rendered  without  so  much 
compression:— 

[81  ] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

"Yon  Sun  arid  Stars,,  and  fatal  flight  of  days,— 
There  are,  my  Friend,  who  view  with  fearless  gaze." 

But  the  Greeks  would  have  shortened  the  expres 
sion  as  Emerson  did.  In  the  same  Woodnotes  de 
scribing  the  same  "coming  man," 

"Whom  Nature  giveth  for  defence 
His  formidable  innocence," 

this  hyperbole  is  omitted,  perhaps  wisely,  where 
so  much  is  hyperbole:— 

"He  shall  never  be  old, 
Nor  his  fate  shall  be  foretold." 

But  why  leave  out  this  magical  sketch  of  the  sor 
ceress  ? 

"  The  robe  of  silk  in  which  she  shines, 

It  was  woven  of  many  sins ; 
And  the  shreds  which  she  sheds 

In  the  wearing  of  the  same, 
Shall  be  grief  on  grief  and  shame  on  shame." 

There  is  an  imperfect  rhyme,  to  be  sure,  and  the 
thought  is  incoherent — but  so  is  the  creature  de 
picted  ;  and  like  to  like  is  good,  to  say  nothing  of 
the  pleasing  rhythm. 

I  have  mentioned  hyperbole.  It  was  Emerson's 
most  familiar  trope  and  prevailed  in  his  speeches 

[82] 


EMERSON 

and  his  daily  conversation.  In  fact,  Concord  might 
be  styled  the  land  of  Hyperbole  and  Humor,— 
so  abundant  are  they  in  the  writings  of  all  the 
famous  authors  there,  except  Hawthorne,  who 
substituted  a  rhetorical  vitascope.  In  the  summer 
of  1856  I  was  mostly  engaged  in  visiting  Middle 
sex  towns,  holding  meetings,  and  raising  money 
to  keep  Kansas  free  from  negro  slavery.  Our  col 
lege  tutor  in  elocution,  Mr.  Jennison,  for  a  Cam 
bridge  committee,  arranged  a  meeting  in  Lyceum 
Hall,  opposite  the  Colleges  (September  10, 1856), 
at  which  Emerson  consented  to  speak,  so  much 
was  he  concerned  for  our  national  political  situa 
tion.  In  his  speech,  which  I  heard,  he  introduced 
a  passage,  not  set  down  in  his  notes,  and  which 
does  not  appear  in  the  printed  report.  Speaking 
of  the  anti-slavery  opinions  of  the  founders  of 
the  Republic  (Washington,  Jefferson,  Franklin, 
Madison),  and  the  absence  of  such  men  from  the 
ranks  of  the  conspirators  against  liberty  to-day, 
he  quoted  the  antithesis  of  Tacitus,  remarking  on 
the  absence  of  the  busts  of  Brutus  and  Cassius 
from  the  funeral  procession  of  Junia,  who  was 

[83] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
wife  of  Cassius  and  sister  of  Brutus:  "Sed  prse- 
fulgebant  Cassius  atque  Brutus,  eo  ipso,  quod 
effigies  eorum  non  visebantur,"-— "Eo  ipso  prae- 
fulgebant,"  cried  Emerson,  "quod  non  visebantur! 
Yes,  they  glared  out  of  their  absence"  Here  was 
hyperbole  again,  and  compression  of  the  already 
concise  Roman  annalist. 

In  conversation  it  was  the  same.  I  was  taking 
tea  one  evening  at  the  Emersons'  before  the  Civ 
il  War,  when  Mrs.  Emerson,  just  returned  from 
Boston,  where  some  of  her  friends  were  ardent 
Episcopalians,  had  been  ruffled  by  the  spiritual 
pride  of  some  dignitary  of  Henry  the  Eighth's 
church,  whose  quoted  remark  implied  there  was 
no  true  religion  anywhere  in  New  England  out 
side  of  what  he  styled  "The  Church,"  with  a 
capital  C.  She  was  telling  us  what  her  reply  had 
been  to  the  lady  quoting  the  dictum.  "And  did 
you  tell  her,  Queenie"  (Emerson's  domestic  title 
for  his  wife),  "that  it  is  the  church  of  all  the 
donkeys  in  America?"  with  his  most  benevolent 
smile.  Now  he  did  not  mean  that  all  that  class 
of  our  people  were  Anglicans, — only  to  satirize  a 

[84] 


EMERSON 

sect  which  at  that  time  had  not  its  fair  share  of 
the  ideas  and  scientific  truth  of  the  American 
people;  but  was  still  apt  to  think  that  geology 
was  an  atheistic  attack  on  Moses  and  the  Book 
of  Genesis. 

Without  being  a  partisan  in  his  turn  of  mind, 
as  the  brothers  Hoar  of  Concord  were,  Emerson 
was  frank  and  direct  in  his  advocacy  of  what  he 
thought  the  national  cause  at  any  time;  and  this 
made  him  earnest  in  behalf  of  Charles  Sumner 
and  the  exclusion  of  slavery  from  Kansas.  He 
spoke  warmly  at  the  meeting  in  Concord  Town 
Hall  (where  he  must  have  read  lectures  or  made 
speeches  fifty  times  from  1852  till  his  death,  thir 
ty  years  later)  to  protest  against  the  assault  on 
Massachusetts  through  her  senator,  when  he  was 
almost  assassinated  by  Brooks  of  Carolina.  And 
wiien,  a  few  days  later,  our  first  Kansas  meeting 
was  held  there,  resulting  in  a  general  subscription 
of  money  to  aid  the  Free-State  men  in  Kansas, 
Emerson  was  one  of  the  large  givers.  As  secre 
tary  of  the  meeting,  I  retained  the  subscription 
paper,  and  some  of  the  names  may  be  mentioned. 

[85] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
Concord  was  then  a  town  of  less  than  half  its 
present  population, — not  twenty-three  hundred 
in  1855, — and  contained  few  persons  of  wealth, 
the  largest  property  not  exceeding  two  hundred 
and  fifty  thousand  dollars  probably.  Yet  the  first 
subscription  for  Kansas  was  nearly  one  thousand 
dollars,  and  there  were  four  givers  of  one  hun 
dred  dollars  each :  Samuel  Hoar,  and  his  son  Judge 
Hoar,  John  S.  Keyes,  and  F.  B.  Sanborn.  Four 
gave  fifty  dollars  each :  R.  W.  Emerson,  Colonel 
Whiting,  Nathan  Brooks  (father-in-law  of  Judge 
Hoar),  and  Ozias  Morse;  six  gave  twenty-five 
dollars  each :  George  M.  Brooks,  Samuel  Staples, 
John  Brown,  Jr.,  Daniel  B.  Clarke,  Reuben  Rice, 
and  "A  Lady" — probably  either  Mrs.  Emerson 
or  Miss  Hoar;  then  followed  subscriptions  of 
twenty,  ten,  and  five  dollars;  while  a  few  chil 
dren  and  poor  men  gave  from  fifty  cents  to  two 
dollars  each.  These  subscriptions  were  afterwards 
increased  by  gifts  of  money,  clothing,  etc.,  until 
before  a  year  passed  they  had  amounted  to  nearly 
or  quite  two  thousand  dollars — or  almost  a  dol 
lar  each  for  every  inhabitant.  When  in  the  sum- 

[86] 


EMERSON 

mer  following  I  became  a  member  and  secretary 
of  the  State  Kansas  Committee,  and  in  that  ca 
pacity  visited  the  National  Committee's  office  in 
Chicago,  and  then  went  further  west,  to  call  on 
the  Governor  of  Iowa,  and  traverse  that  State 
as  far  as  to  Nebraska  City  on  the  west  of  the 
Missouri  River,  I  corresponded  with  Emerson. 
The  next  winter,  he  made  the  acquaintance  of 
John  Brown,  the  Kansas  hero,  who  had  come 
to  visit  me  in  Concord,  and  Emerson  invited 
him  to  his  house  for  a  night.  In  this  visit  was  ac 
quired  that  full  knowledge  of  Brown's  character 
(though  not  of  his  secret  plans)  which  enabled 
Emerson  at  the  time  of  the  Virginia  foray  and 
capture  of  Brown,  to  tell  his  story  effectively  be 
fore  large  audiences  in  Boston  and  Salem.  Mr. 
Alcott,  in  1878,  gave  me  this  account  of  Emer 
son's  and  Thoreau's  reception  of  the  news  of  the 
Harper's  Ferry  affair. 

"When  the  tidings  came  that  John  Brown  was 
captured,  I  was  with  Henry  Thoreau  at  Emer 
son's  house.  It  was  startling  to  all  of  us.  Thoreau 
spoke  of  it  then  much  as  he  soon  afterwards  did 

[87] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
publicly — addressing  his  townsmen  in  the  parish 
vestry,  and  the  people  of  Worcester  and  Boston, 
with  his  Plea  for  Captain  John  Brown.  [Mr.  Al- 
cott  thought  Thoreau  rang  the  bell  himself  for 
this  Concord  address,  but  he  probably  confounded 
the  occasion  with  that  in  August,  1844,  when 
Emerson  was  to  give  his  address  on  West  India 
Emancipation,  mentioned  earlier  in  this  book.  At 
that  time  Thoreau  not  only  rang  the  bell,  but 
previously  had  gone  about  the  village,  giving 
notice  at  the  house-doors  that  Emerson  would 
speak  at  the  vestry.]  I  said  that  Brown's  death 
would  be  a  new  crucifixion,  and  dwelt  upon  the 
fact  of  Brown's  martyrdom.  Emerson  said  little 
then;  it  seemed  to  be  a  painful  subject  to  him. 
Some  weeks  after,  when  he  had  returned  from 
Salem,  where  he  made  that  much-quoted  speech 
in  praise  of  Brown  (of  which  he  gave  you  the 
manuscript),  he  said  to  me,  with  an  air  of  relief, 
'We  have  had  enough  of  this  dreary  business.' 
But  when  we  were  making  arrangements,  with 
Thoreau  and  yourself  and  others,  for  that  'Ser 
vice  for  the  Death  of  a  Martyr'  which  we  held 

[88] 


EMERSON 

at  the  Concord  Town  Hall,  the  day  of  Brown's 
execution,  Emerson  made  some  of  the  best  se 
lections  used,  and  read  them  himself  at  the  meet 
ing,  as  Thoreau  did  his  selections  from  Mar  veil 
and  Tacitus." 

In  truth,  as  Hazlitt  says  of  Sir  Francis  Bur- 
dett,  there  was  no  honest  cause  Emerson  dared 
not  avow,  no  oppressed  person  whom  he  was  not 
forward  to  succor.  He  did  not  wholly  agree  with 
the  Garrisonian  Abolitionists,  but  he  supported 
their  main  cause,. as  he  did  Brown's. 

It  was  during  my  first  residence  in  Concord, 
and  while  Hawthorne  was  our  consular  represen 
tative  at  Liverpool,  that  I  became  acquainted 
through  Emerson  with  the  theories  and  caprices 
of  Miss  Delia  Bacon,  of  New  Haven,  who  may  be 
said  to  have  invented,  as  much  as  any  one  person 
did,  that  craze  now  grown  to  such  magnitude,— 
that  Bacon  of  Saint  Albans  wrote  the  plays  and 
poems  of  Shakespeare.  This  was  not  exactly  Miss 
Bacon's  first  whim,  but  that  the  plays  came  as  the 
product  of  a  circle  of  great  men  of  Elizabeth's 
court, — Raleigh,  Bacon,  and  others ;  a  theory  that 

[89] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
finds  some  countenance,  though  very  slight,  in 
John  Toland's  odd  letter  of  two  centuries  ago 
declaring  that  there  was  such  a  circle,  and  that 
Giordano  Bruno,  then  in  England,  belonged  to  it 
in  1585.  Bruno  dedicated  one  of  his  quaint  books 
to  Sidney,  whom  Toland  thought  one  of  the  com 
pany;  and  there  are  certain  faint  indications  that 
Shakespeare  had  read  and  understood  Bruno's 
ideas.  Miss  Bacon,  a  brilliant,  unhappy  person, 
came  to  Emerson  with  her  theory  in  1852;  he  lis 
tened  to  her  with  patience  and  interest,  though 
not  persuaded.  When  she  was  aided  by  a  citizen 
of  New  York  to  pursue  her  inquiries  in  England, 
Emerson  gave  her  letters  to  Carlyle,  Doctor  Chap 
man,  and  other  English  friends,  and  in  her  des 
titution  he  commended  her  to  Hawthorne  at 
Liverpool.  He  procured  for  her  first  essays  on 
the  subject  a  publisher  in  America,  as  Carlyle  did 
in  London.  Putnam  s  Magazine,  then  flourishing, 
and  having  among  its  contributors  Henry  James, 
G.  W.  Curtis,  and  (rarely)  Thoreau  and  Emerson 
himself,  accepted  an  article  or  two  from  Miss 
Bacon.  One  such  appeared  there;  another,  in  a 

[90] 


EMERSON 

manuscript  or  half-printed  state,  was  lost  on  the 
way  from  New  York  to  Concord,  intrusted  to  a 
relative  of  Emerson.  This  loss,  later,  led  to  re 
proaches  from  Miss  Bacon  which  Emerson  did  not 
wholly  escape.  Her  proud  and  whimsical  char 
acter,  verging  toward  insanity,  made  these  favors 
from  her  friends  useless  to  her;  and  when  she 
turned  upon  him  (as  later  upon  Hawthorne)  with 
these  reproaches,  Emerson's  angelic  patience  did 
not  resent  it.  Finally,  her  insanity  declared  itself 
without  disguise,  and  she  was  committed  to  an 
asylum  not  far  from  Shakespeare's  grave.  It  fell 
to  Emerson  to  communicate  this  dismal  fact  to 
her  brother,  Reverend  Doctor  Bacon  of  New 
Haven,  who  had  been  less  tolerant  of  her  infirmi 
ties  than  the  Concord  authors  had.  Here  is  his 
noble  letter:— 

"CONCORD,  February  18,  1858. 
"DEAR  SIR: 

"  I  have  received  from  Mrs.  Flower,  of  Stratford-on-Avon,  the  en- 
"  closed  note,  which  I  hasten  to  forward  to  you.  I  could  heartily 
"  wish  that  I  had  very  different  news  to  send  you  of  a  person  who 
"  has  high  claims  on  me,  and  all  of  us  who  love  genius  and  elevation 
"  of  character.  These  qualities  have  so  shone  in  Miss  Bacon  that, 

[91  ] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

"  while  their  present  eclipse  is  the  greater  calamity,  it  seems  as  if  the 
"  care  of  her  in  these  present  distressing  circumstances  ought  not  to 
t(  be  at  private,  but  at  the  public  charge  of  scholars  and  friends  of 
"  learning  and  truth.  If  I  can  serve  you  in  any  manner  in  relation 
"  to  her,  you  will  please  to  command  me. 

"  With  great  respect, 

"R.  W.  EMERSON. 
"  DR.  LEONARD   BACON." 

"Osman,"  said  Emerson,  sketching  himself, 
whether  consciously  or  not,  "had  a  humanity  so 
broad  and  deep  that,  although  his  speech  was  so 
bold  and  free  with  the  Koran  as  to  disgust  all  the 
dervishes,  yet  there  was  never  a  poor  outcast,  ec 
centric  or  insane  man, — some  fool  who  had  cut 
off  his  beard,  or  who  had  been  mutilated  under 
a  vow,  or  had  a  pet  madness  in  his  brain, — but 
fled  at  once  to  him.  That  great  heart  lay  there  so 
sunny  and  hospitable  in  the  centre  of  the  coun 
try  that  it  seemed  as  if  the  instinct  of  all  suf 
ferers  drew  them  to  his  side.  And  the  madness 
which  he  harbored  he  did  not  share." 

Instances  confirmatory  of  this  might  be  multi 
plied.  The  milder  eccentricities  of  genius,  seen  in 
his  friends  Alcott,  Thoreau,  and  Channing,  were 

[92] 


EMERSON 

of  course  more  easily  borne  with,  and  were  only 
spoken  of  by  Emerson  for  instruction  to  a  younger 
friend,  or  for  a  harmless  smile.  He  told  his  daugh 
ter  Ellen  that  if  he  should  die  before  Alcott  and 
Channing  "two  good  books  will  be  lost."  He 
formed  the  acquaintance  with  the  three  in  the 
order  followed  above, — Alcott  first  and  Chan 
ning  third.  Mr.  Alcott  told  me  in  1878,  after  we 
had  bathed  together  in  Walden,  one  hot  August 
day,  that  he  first  heard  Emerson  preach  in  Doc 
tor  Channing's  church  in  Federal  Street,  Boston, 
in  1829,  on  The  Universality  of  the  Moral  Senti 
ment.  "I  was  greatly  struck  with  the  youth  of 
the  preacher,  the  beauty  of  his  elocution,  and  the 
direct,  sincere  manner  in  which  he  addressed  his 
hearers.  But  I  did  not  become  acquainted  with 
the  young  clergyman  till  after  my  return  from 
Philadelphia  (where  Anna  and  Louisa  were  born) 
in  1834,  when  I  established  my  Temple  School  in 
Boston.  We  became  intimate,  and  soon  after,  I 
went  with  Emerson  to  hear  him  read  a  Phi  Beta 
poem  at  Harvard  College,  in  which  was  a  strik 
ing  passage  about  Washington.  As  the  proces- 

[93] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
sion  was  forming  to  enter  the  church  where  the 
oration  and  poem  were  to  be  given,  Emerson  took 
my  arm  (I  not  being  a  member  of  the  Society, 
nor  even  a  graduate  of  Yale)  and  saying,  *  Come, 
we  will  not  mince  matters,'  stepped  briskly  along 
with  me  at  his  side  into  the  church.  When  his 
time  came  to  read  the  poem  from  the  platform, 
Emerson  read  smoothly  for  a  while;  then,  not 
feeling  satisfied  with  what  he  had  written,  closed 
his  reading  abruptly  and  sat  down." 

The  next  day,  as  I  was  sitting  with  Emerson 
to  entertain  him  while  Wyatt  Eaton  was  sketch 
ing  his  portrait  for  Scribners  Magazine,  I  asked 
him  about  this  poem.  He  said  he  had  composed 
such  a  poem,  and  it  may  have  had  a  passage  in  it 
about  Washington;  but  he  had  quite  forgotten 
the  facts  about  its  delivery  in  Cambridge.  After 
his  father's  death,  Doctor  Emerson  told  me  that 
this  poem  was  written  for  delivery  in  1834;  that 
it  contained  two  striking  passages,  one  on  Wash 
ington  and  another  on  Lafayette,  besides  the  lines 
on  Webster  which  are  printed  among  the  posthu 
mous  poems  (edition  of  1884).  The  whole  poem 

[94] 


EMERSON 

is  in  the  measure  of  Pope  and  Dryden,  with  an 
occasional  Alexandrine;  and  I  fancy  that  the  re 
markable  lines  in  Woodnotes  beginning 

ee  In  unplowed  Maine  he  sought  the  lumberers'  gang," 

were  intended  for  this  poem,  which  has  never 
been  printed  entire.  Channing  entered  Harvard 
this  year  (1834)  and  Thoreau  had  entered  the 
year  before. 

At  various  dates  from  1860  to  1880,  Emerson 
spoke  to  me  of  Thoreau,  saying,  among  other 
things:  "He  was  a  person  who  said  and  wrote 
surprising  things,  not  accounted  for  by  anything 
in  his  antecedents, — his  birth,  his  education,  or 
his  way  of  life.  But  why  is  he  never  frank  ?  That 
was  an  excellent  saying  of  Elizabeth  Hoar's  about 
him:  'I  love  Henry,  but  I  can  never  like  him.' 
What  is  so  cheap  as  politeness?  I  have  no  social 
pleasure  with  Henry,  though  more  than  once  the 
best  conversation.  Yes,  I  know  he  needs  cherish 
ing  and  care.  Yet  who  can  care  and  cherish,  when 
we  are  so  driven  with  our  own  affairs  ?  Longfellow 
and  Lowell  have  not  appreciated  Thoreau  as  a 

[95] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
thinker  and  writer,  and  Judge  Hoar  has  confirmed 
them  in  their  scepticism.  Henry  makes  an  instant 
impression,  one  way  or  the  other.  He  met  Thomas 
Cholmondeley  in  my  house,  in  1854, — you  also 
met  that  singularly  verdant  Englishman  there, 
—who  was  so  pleased  with  the  nonchalant  man 
ner  of  Thoreau  that  he  went  at  once  and  engaged 
to  board  at  Mrs.  Thoreau's,  where  his  admiration 
of  Henry  grew  greater  by  daily  contact.  Thoreau 
did  not  at  first  appreciate  his  Shropshire  friend, 
but  came  to  value  him  highly." 

In  1874-75,  Emerson  was  much  in  favor  of 
printing  Thoreau's  journals  entire,  particularly  the 
natural  history  in  them.  He  said  that  he  advised 
Miss  Thoreau  (who  died  in  1876)  to  put  the  jour 
nals  in  my  charge,  as  they  had  been  for  a  time, 
while  I  was  living  in  her  house,  where  the  manu 
scripts  remained  for  many  years  after  Thoreau's 
death.  He  told  her  that  I  could  well  select  the 
passages  for  printing,  and  could  call  on  Mr.  Chan- 
ning  to  aid  in  editing  them,  as  she  had  done,  soon 
after  Henry's  death.  The  mention  of  Channing 
displeased  her;  she  told  Emerson  that,  without 

[96] 


EMERSON 

asking  her  consent,  or  giving  her  knowledge  of 
what  he  was  to  do  with  them,  Channing  had 
gone  to  Henry's  room  in  the  west  attic,  taken  the 
journals,  or  some  of  them,  and  kept  them  for  a 
time.  Fearing  that  he  would  have  access  to  them 
in  my  custody,  she  had  requested  Emerson  to 
have  them  removed  to  the  town  library.  At  her 
death  she  left  them  to  Mr.  Blake.  Emerson  re 
gretted  this;  he  had  read  the  selections  made  by 
Mr.  Blake  and  printed  in  The  Atlantic^  and  did 
not  think  the  best  selections  had  been  made,  or 
the  best  arrangement  followed.  He  said  he  read 
Channing's  Thoreau,  the  Poet- Naturalist  when  it 
came  out  in  1873,  but  did  not  wholly  like  it;  he 
would  read  it  again,  since  I  praised  it.2 

When  Emerson's  edition  of  Thoreau's  Letters 
and  a  few  poems  came  out,  I  remonstrated  with 
him  for  printing  so  few  of  the  verses.  He  replied 
that  he  had  chosen  the  best,  and  that  it  would 
do  Thoreau  no  credit  to  print  them  all,  as  I  sug 
gested, — every  line,  whether  good  or  bad,  as  we 
do  with  the  verse  of  the  Greeks,  whom  Thoreau 
in  some  points  so  resembled.  He  remained  firm 

[97] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

in  his  view,  and  afterwards  told  me  (in  1878)  that 
Thoreau's  best  poem  was  the  earliest  one,  Sym 
pathy,  published  first  in  The  Dial  in  1840. 

In  his  early  relations  with  Alcott  in  Concord 
(1840-41),  there  were  incidents  that  have  escaped 
notice,  I  think.  Soon  after  the  Alcott  family 
reached  Concord,  spending  the  first  night  at  the 
Middlesex  tavern,  Mr.  Emerson  was  summoned 
there  to  perform  the  wedding  ceremony  for  the 
landlord's  daughter,  Miss  Wesson,  who  married 
Sam  Staples,  then  an  assistant  in  the  tavern, 
but  afterwards  deputy  sheriff  and  jailer;  and  at 
this  ceremony  Mr.  Alcott  was  a  witness.  At  Mr. 
Emerson's  own  Plymouth  wedding  in  1835,  Sam, 
as  the  stable  boy,  had  taken  to  him  at  the  Old 
Manse  the  horse  and  chaise  which  was  to  convey 
the  bridegroom  to  Miss  Jackson's  Winslow  Man 
sion  for  the  ceremony.  He  was  then  living  with 
his  mother  at  Doctor  Ripley's,  and  was  paying  for 
the  board  of  both  the  sum  of  eight  dollars  only 
a  week — with  a  stipulation  that  when  both  were 
at  home,  they  should  have  a  fire  together  in  one  of 
the  parlors,  and  when  Mr.  Emerson  was  absent, 

[98] 


EMERSON 

his  mother  should  have  a  fire  in  her  own  chamber. 
Considering  that  he  was  thus  the  more  expensive 
of  the  two,  he  proposed  to  his  grandfather  that  he 

should  pay  five  dollars  of  the  eight,  and  his  mo- 

i 
ther  but  three.  In  1841,  before  the  Alcotts  had 

i 

been  in  Concord  a  year,  Emerson  proposed,  with 
the  approval  of  his  wife,  that  Mr.  Alcott  and  his 
family  (a  wife  and  four  children)  should  occupy 
"half  our  house  and  store-room  free";  Mr.  Alcott 
to  work  in  the  garden,  and  Mrs.  Alcott  to  share 
the  household  labors  with  Mrs.  Emerson.  The 
families  and  tables  were  to  be  separate,  "save  one 
oven  to  bake  our  puddings  and  the  same  pot  for 
our  potatoes;  but  not  the  same  cradle  for  our 

babies."  Mrs.  Alcott  had  the  practical  good  sense 

i 
to  decline  this  generous  but  embarrassing  offer; 

which  was  as  near  as  Emerson  ever  came,  1  think, 
to  the  project  of  a  community  for  himself. 

It  was  a  little  earlier  than  this  that  Emerson 
had  formed  his  friendship  with  the  shy  and  capri 
cious  poet  Ellery  Channing.  They  were  brought 
together  in  Boston,  in  December,  1840,  by  the 
good  offices  of  Samuel  Gray  Ward  of  Boston 

[99] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
(now  of  Washington),  who  had  for  some  years 
shared  with  Miss  Caroline  Sturgis  of  Boston  the 
hazardous  position  of  Channing's  intimate.  Em 
erson,  who  had  seen  some  of  his  early  verses,  and 
even  printed  them  in  the  October  Dial,  had  long 
been  eager  to  meet  the  poet;  but  he  was  either 
on  the  prairies  of  Illinois,  or  on  the  road  to  or 
from  the  West,  or  shunning  society  in  Boston,  or 
at  Curzon's  Mill,  or  at  "Aunt  Becky  Atkins's"  in 
Newburyport.  Finally  they  came  together,  these 
two  poets,  and  each  enjoyed  the  other.  Their 
correspondence,  fitful  and  moody  on  Channing's 
part,  brief  and  wise  from  Emerson's  pen,  displays 
a  singular  friendship,  extending  over  more  than 
forty  years,  and,  so  far  as  Emerson  is  concerned, 
justifying  his  sweet  verse  in  the  Essays: — 

"I  fancied  he  was  fled, 
And,  after  many  a  year, 
Glowed  unexhausted  kindliness 
Like  daily  sunrise  there." 

On  Channing's  part  the  conditions  vary  greatly. 
He  never  loses  his  admiration  for  Emerson's 
genius,  nor  quite  fails  in  gratitude  for  the  con- 

[  100  ] 


EMERSON 

stant  services  which  Emerson  renders;  but  the 
moods  of  a  disappointed  man  are  hard  to  restrain. 
That  remoteness  and  aloofness  of  Emerson  at 
times,  of  which  I  spoke  early  in  this  book,  gave 
Channing  real  agony;  he  was  formed  for  the 
closest  intimacy  with  a  very  few  persons,  he  had 
fixed  his  affection  upon  Emerson,  and  it  did  not 
seem  to  him  to  be  returned.  "Unappreciated!  It  is 
this,"  he  said,  in  a  letter  to  another  friend,  "which 
strikes  through  the  soul  of  a  man  like  a  slow  fire. 
It  is  no  longer  Nature ;  persons  begin  to  assume 
a  terrific  value  to  me.  I  thought  I  had  done  with 
persons.  No — they  rise  and  tear  me,  year  after 
year."  But  this  is  only  one  of  the  phases  of  this 
long  friendship.  At  other  times,  and  for  the  most 
part,  there  was  cordiality  in  Emerson,  and  a  nearer 
approach  to  sympathy  than  with  a  somewhat  so 
cially  rude  nature,  such  as  Thoreau's  was,  in  con 
trast  with  Emerson's  centuries  of  social  culture. 

Channing's  special  gift  was  aesthetic ;  he  could 
take  his  friends,  and  he  often  took  Emerson,  to 
scenes  in  the  landscape  which  opened  new  ideas  in 
art,  and  new  views  of  Nature.  In  literature,  too, 

[101  ] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
as  in  art,  his  scope  was  wide  and  his  judgment 
manly  and  delicate.  His  humor  was  suffusing 
and  irresistible ;  the  wretchedness  of  which  he  so 
often  spoke,  and  which  indeed  haunted  him,  was 
soothed  and  often  dispelled  by  his  love  of  Victor 
Cousin's  trinity:  the  Good,  the  Beautiful,  and  the 
True.  These  abstractions,  as  with  Shakespeare 
and  Homer,  floated  in  a  sea  of  humor,  softly  laps 
ing  or  noisily  mirthful, — the  anerithmon  gelasma 
of  a  Greek  poet.  To  Emerson,  whose  study  was 
Man  and  Nature,  and  whose  life  craved  variety, 
C banning  furnished  that  element  of  the  unex 
pected  which  is  so  apt  to  be  lost  in  a  long  friend 
ship,  and  perhaps  was  finally  lost  in  this  one. 

Thus,  about  1878,  wrhen  I  was  relating  to  Em 
erson  what  constant  topics  of  enlivening  conver 
sation  Channing  brought  with  him  to  his  walks 
and  talks  with  me,  Emerson  sighed  and  said,  "It 
used  to  be  so  with  me,  but  of  late  he  says  little 
or  nothing,  and  I  do  not  find  in  him  that  'in 
exhaustible  fund  of  good  fellowship'  of  which 
Thoreau  told  Ricketson,  and  which  was  once  in 
him."  Probably  there  was  a  fault  on  both  sides, 

[  102] 


EMERSON 

—a  little  lack  of  confidence  on  Emerson's  part, 
after  Channing  had  printed,  without  consulting 
him,  some  passages  copied  with  his  consent  from 
Emerson's  journals,  years  before;  and  on  Chan- 
ning's  part  some  grief  at  this  withdrawal.  Tho- 
reau,  in  a  similar  experience,  had  confided  to  his 
journal  the  suffering  he  felt,  but  Channing,  who 
kept  journals  but  semi-occasionally,  had  no  such 
resource.  His  letters  to  Emerson  which  are  pre 
served,  and  may  some  time  be  published,  contain 
many  passages  showing  deep  insight  and  frequent 
grace  of  expression.  During  his  short  residence  in 
New  York  in  1844-45,  he  thus  described  his  way 
of  letter- writing,  and  his  preference  for  the  coun 
try  over  the  city  (December  19, 1844):— 

"Would  to  God  I  had  something  to  tell  you 
worth  your  hearing!  Don't  thank  me  in  any  of 
your  letters  for  mine.  When  I  am  at  home  I  run 
into  your  house;  when  I  am  away  I  run  in  by 
means  of  a  letter.  Do  not  look  upon  it  in  any 
other  light,  for  Heaven's  sake.  I  have  no  idea  of 
being  estranged  at  all  from  your  house  by  coming 
a  few  paltry  hundred  miles  and  taking  up  my 

[  103  ] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
quarters  here.  I  fear  I  shall  have  a  barren  winter 
in  New  York.  I  do  not  require  the  city;  it  is  no 
tug  on  my  faculties.  It  does  tug  me  to  live  in  the 
country, — in  the  hard,  still,  severe,  iron-bound 
fields  of  New  England.  There,  in  solitude,  I  paced 
many  a  day,  treading  wearily  the  lone  avenues  of 
the  silent  woods,  sustained  only  in  life  by  the 
breath  of  the  sky.  To  dwell  there  is  sufficient  to 
test  and  reduce  all  the  powers  of  a  man, — a  soli 
tary,  severe  life,  a  time  of  wailing  and  barrenness. 
There  is  not  a  field  in  that  village  but  I  have 
watered  it  with  my  tears." 

Few  of  Emerson's  letters  have  been  published; 
many  of  them  should  be.  Those  which  appear  in 
these  pages  will  indicate  what  treasures  they  con 
tain.  That  which  I  am  now  to  give  illustrates  his 
constant  generosity  toward  other  authors,  and  his 
high  appreciation  of  this  poet  of  whom  we  have 
been  hearing.  It  relates  to  the  incomplete  manu 
script  of  Channing's  "colloquial  poem,"  as  he 
quaintly  called  it,  The  Wanderer,  which  had  been 
in  my  hands  some  months  when  I  submitted  it 
to  Emerson,  a  year  before  it  was  printed  by  Os- 

[  104  ] 


—rff~~ 
f£jt_&^^  —  <^ 


jX^^  ^^  ^^  y^  ^X  ^^     /  r 

/  x^  //      /         /  ^^         /\    A  I  /**  / 


^ 


EMERSON 

good  in  Boston.  He  returned  it  to  me,  after  some 
weeks,  with  this  letter,  sent  to  Springfield,  where 
I  was  living  from  1868  to  1872,  in  which  year  I 
returned  to  Concord. 

"  CONCORD,  13  November,  1870. 
"MY  DEAR  SIR: 

"  I  ought  not  to  have  returned  the  Manuscript  you  were  so  good  and 
"careful  to  lend  me,  without  special  acknowledgment.  But  on  the 
"  day  when  I  received  your  note,  I  was  busy  with  work  which  I  was 
"to  carry  in  the  morning  to  Boston,  to  be  more  busy  there  injtn- 
"  ishing  the  same.  Indeed,  I  have  been  such  a  hack  lately  with  my 
"  things,  and  as  it  happened,  a  sick  hack,  too,  that  I  have  not  done 
"justice  to  that  Manuscript  in  all  this  time. 

"  Yet  I  read  the  twojirst  parts  not  only  with  great  pleasure,  but 
"with  surprise  at  the  power  and  the  fidelity  of  the  writing.  When 
"you  can  see  through  the  handwriting,  the  thought  is  so  active  and 
"  original,  the  observation  of  nature  so  incessant,  that  it  must  be 
"  attractive,  I  think,  to  all  good  readers.  It  absolves  the  writer  in- 
"  stantly  from  the  charge  of  idleness  or  solitariness,  by  showing  that 
"his  immense  vacation  is  all  well  spent.  What  botany  and  orni- 
"  thology  and  wonderful  eye  for  landscape  he  has !  I  long  to  see 
"  and  read  it  all  in  fair  print. 

"  The  third  part,  the  'Sea'  I  did  notjtnish, — perhaps  did  not 
"read  far, — it  seemed  to  me  not  nearly  so  happily  written;  and 
"  being,  as  I  have  said,  myself  preoccupied,  I  did  not  return  to  it. 
"  I  could  not  resist  the  showing  'Monadnoc'  to  Ellen  and  Edward, 
"  who  read  it  with  loud  joy.  I  heartily  hope  that  the  book  can  and 

[  105  ] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 

te  will  be  printed,  as  it  will,  I  think,  conquer  to  itself  a  valuable  pub- 
(l  lie,  and  thereby  essentially  benejit  the  author  in  more  ways  than  a 

"  good  sale. 

"  With  great  regard  yours, 

"R.  W.  EMERSON. 
"F.  B.  SANBORN,  ESQ." 

The  Emerson  children  here  mentioned  as  read 
ing  the  descriptions  of  "Cheshire's  haughty  hill," 
as  Emerson  styled  his  favorite  mountain  in  the 
Concord  prospect,  had  themselves  spent  days  and 
nights  on  Monadnoc  with  Channing  and  their 
younger  friends;  and  a  part  of  the  poem  dealt 
with  them  and  their  adventures  there.  The  plea 
sure  they  took  in  the  reading  had  one  inconven 
ience  for  me.  They  could  not  refrain  from  quot 
ing  some  of  his  own  verses  to  the  author,  when 
taking  tea  at  the  Emerson  house,  and  this  re 
vealed  to  the  quick-witted  poet  that  his  manu 
script,  which  he  had  intrusted  to  me  to  find  him 
a  publisher,  had  been  in  Emerson's  hands,  to 
whom  he  had  not  himself  intended  to  show  it  till 
it  should  appear  "in  fair  print."  He  therefore  in 
stantly  wrote  to  me  in  Springfield,  asking  the 
return  of  the  sheets.  I  had  got  a  part  of  them 

[106] 


EMERSON 

copied,  but  not  all,  and  I  replied  that  I  would 
bring  them  with  me  to  Concord  at  an  early  date, 
when  the  copy  was  completed;  and  this  I  did, 
without  explaining  to  him  what  use  Emerson  had 
made  of  the  first  part  of  the  poem.  Afterwards, 
when  we  had  found  a  publisher,  it  was  agreed 
that  Emerson  should  write  a  preface,  as  he  did 
—using  some  of  the  same  expressions  found  in 
the  above  letter. 

During  their  long  familiarity  Ellery  Channing 
noted  down  a  few  of  the  remarks  which  Emerson 
made  in  a  thousand  conversations,  and  Emerson 
did  the  like  by  Channing.  Some  of  these  appear 
in  the  chapters  of  Channing's  Thoreau  which  he 
called  "Walks  and  Talks"  and  "Characters"; 
others  wTill  be  given  here.  Some  of  Emerson's 
comments  came  out  in  The  Atlantic  Monthly  last 
July  (1902),  but  with  misprints  that  injured  their 
effect.  The  passage  dated  in  1859,  for  instance, 
where  it  relates  to  Channing's  poem  of  Near 
Home,  printed  in  1858,  should  read  thus:— 

"Channing,  who  writes  a  poem  for  our  fields, 
begins  to  help  us.  That  is  construction,  and  better 

[107] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
than  running  to  Charlemagne  and  Alfred  for  sub 
jects.  Near  Home  is  a  poem  which  would  delight 
the  heart  of  Wordsworth,  though  genuinely  ori 
ginal,  and  with  a  simplicity  of  plan  which  allows 
the  writer  to  leave  out  all  the  prose.  'T  is  a  series 
of  sketches  of  natural  objects  such  as  abound  in 
New  England,  enwreathed  by  the  thoughts  they 
suggest  to  a  contemplative  pilgrim, — 

'Unsleeping  truths  by  which  wheels  on  Heaven's  prime.' 

There  is  a  neglect  of  superficial  correctness  which 
looks  a  little  studied,  as  if  perhaps  the  poet  chal 
lenged  notice  to  his  subtler  melody;  and  strokes 
of  skill  which  recall  the  great  masters.  There  is 
nothing  conventional  in  the  thought  or  the  illus 
tration;  but 

( Thoughts  that  voluntary  move 
Harmonious  numbers' 

and  pictures  seen  by  an  instructed  eye." 

In  his  mention  of  "two  notable  acquaintances 
of  mine,  not  else  to  be  approximated,"  Emerson 
had  in  mind,  I  suppose,  Henry  Thoreau  and  Wil 
liam  Tappan,  in  whose  acquaintance  "W.  E.  C. 

[  108  ] 


EMERSON 

served  as  a  companion  of  H.  D.  T.,  and  Tappan 
of  Channing."  This,  at  any  rate,  is  what  occurred. 
Again,  in  the  earliest  mention  of  Channing  in 
these  Atlantic  passages,  the  date  should  be  1840, 
not  1841,  and  the  remark,  "C.'s  eyes  are  a  com 
pliment  to  the  human  race,"  etc.,  was  meant  to 
apply  to  Caroline  Sturgis,  to  whom  and  of  whom 
Channing  wrote  some  of  his  best  early  poems.  On 
this  point  Emerson  said  to  me  in  1874,  and  sub 
sequently:  "Ellery  Channing's  earliest  friends 
were  Caroline  Sturgis  and  S.  G.  Ward,  by  whom 
he  was  introduced  to  me  in  1840,  after  I  had 
printed  some  of  his  verses  in  The  Dial  as  'New 
Poetry.'  You  know  his  father,  Doctor  Walter 
Channing;  his  uncle,  Doctor  Channing  the  min 
ister,  was  the  patron  of  my  early  studies  in  divin 
ity.  He  was  one  of  three  persons  whom  I  have 
heard  speak  more  eloquently  than  any  others;  and 
I  never  could  find  in  the  hymns  what  I  heard 
Doctor  Channing  read  from  them  in  his  high 
pulpit.  Ellery 's  mother  dying  early  [in  1822, 
while  Doctor  Channing  was  in  England],  he  was 
brought  up  for  a  while  by  his  mother's  aunt,  Mrs. 

[  109] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
Bennett  Forbes,  sister  of  Colonel  T.  H.  Perkins, 
who  lived  at  Milton  and  was  the  mother  of  our 
friend,  John  Murray  Forbes.  Mrs.  William  Hunt 
[wife  of  the  painter],  who  was  herself  a  Perkins, 
ascribes  all  Ellery's  peculiarities  to  the  Perkins 
blood,  of  which  she  tells  sad  stories.  His  father, 
Doctor  Walter  Channing,  went  abroad  for  his 
medical  education;  when  he  went  again  in  our 
time,  and,  returning  from  Russia,  came  here  to 
Concord  to  see  his  son,  he  found  Ellery  just  start 
ing  out  for  an  afternoon  walk.  He  did  not  give 
it  up  for  the  sake  of  seeing  his  father,  but  left 
him  in  the  house  where  you  once  lived,  to  enter 
tain  himself  as  he  might  with  his  grandchildren. 
I  have  seldom  heard  Ellery  speak  of  Mr.  Al- 
cott  otherwise  than  as  a  fool;  yet  he  has  written 
me  some  of  the  best  things  in  praise  of  Alcott.  I 
do  not  remember  hearing  of  Major  Leviticus,  a 
long  prose  sketch,  in  which  Alcott  is  satirized; 
but  I  now  have  in  my  possession  a  thick  prose 
manuscript  which  Channing  brought  me  many 
years  ago,  but  which  I  did  not  think  good  enough 
to  print,  and  in  which  probably  Alcott  is  men- 

[110] 


EMERSON 

tioned.  Ellery  began  by  being  very  intimate  with 
Miss  Elizabeth  Hoar;  then  suddenly  broke  off 
the  acquaintance,  and  would  not  look  at  her 
when  he  met  her  in  the  street;  but  he  has  re 
cently  [1874]  renewed  his  intimacy  with  her." 

In  this  conversation,  among  others,  Emerson 
said  to  me  "I  hope  it  will  please  Mr.  Alcott  to 
die  first,  so  that  I  can  write  his  biography."  He 
added :  "  I  formerly  and  usually  took  the  greatest 
pleasure  in  his  conversation.  It  is  no  longer  so, 
but  I  suppose  that  is  my  own  fault.  I  am  in  the 
habit  of  saying  that  he  cannot  write ;  but  he  has 
this  gift  of  conversation,  and  the  most  distin 
guished  manners.  Of  this  I  have  seen  surprising 
instances  at  his  conversations,  in  meeting  the  an 
noyances  of  unappreciative  interrupters;  Alcott 
parrying  their  frivolous  questions  with  great  wit 
and  delicacy  of  tact."  In  1878,  when  Emerson  was 
asked  to  send  verses  to  be  printed  anonymously 
in  A  Masque  of  Poets,  which  Roberts  was  soon 
to  publish,  I  told  him  that  Mr.  Alcott  had  some 
verses  there,  and  that  he  had  before  printed  sev 
eral  poems;  to  which  he  replied,  "Mr.  Alcott  is 

[  111  ] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
a  brilliant  talker,  but  he  cannot  write  anything; 
I  should  know  he  could  never  write  a  line  of 
verse."  It  was  in  this  conversation  that  Emerson 
assured  me  it  was  settled  that  he  could  not  him 
self  write  poetry;  and  a  few  moments  after  he 
added,  "Others  have  found  this  out  at  last,  but 
I  could  have  told  them  so  long  ago."  His  daugh 
ter  whispered  that  he  had  taken  this  idea  from 
something  Carlyle  had  said  about  John  Sterling, 
whom  he  would  not  allow  to  be  a  poet,  though 
he  had  written  some  fine  verses.  It  was  soon  after 
this  that  Alcott  began  to  compose  those  Sonnets 
and  Canzonets  published  in  1882,  just  before  Em 
erson's  death,  which  disprove  the  absolute  nega 
tive  of  this  friend  on  his  power  of  writing  verse; 
for  these  octogenarian  sonnets  have  a  peculiar 
merit,  not  often  found  in  portrait-sketches  in 
metrical  form.  The  earliest  of  the  poems  in  this 
book  came  to  my  notice  under  affecting  circum 
stances,  as  this  entry  from  my  journal  shows : — 

(Sunday,  January  4, 1880.}  "At  half-past  three 
to-day,  Mr.  Alcott  called  at  my  house  by  the 
river,  to  spend  the  afternoon,  and  read  me  some 

[112] 


EMERSON 

'  notes '  as  he  said.  These  proved  to  be  the  stanzas 
of  a  new  poem  on  the  death  of  his  daughter 
May  (Madame  Nieriker,  the  wife  of  Ernst  Nie- 
riker  of  Baden  in  Switzerland,  temporarily  resid 
ing  in  Paris),  who  died  near  Paris,  on  December 
30,  1879.  She  had  been  absent  from  Concord  for 
nearly  three  years,  and  was  married  in  London  a 
year  ago.  The  poem  he  calls  Love's  Morrow  and 
it  has  been  written  in  the  nights  and  mornings 
since  he  had  tidings  of  this  youngest  daughter's 
death,  on  the  last  day  of  the  old  year.  He  was 
himself  eighty  years  old  on  the  twenty-ninth  of 
November  last;  his  daughter  Louisa  forty-seven 
on  the  same  day,  and  May  thirty-nine  years  old 
last  July.  It  seemed  to  me  the  finest  of  Mr.  Al- 
cott's  many  poems  which  I  have  seen ;  expressing 
with  simplicity  and  pathos  the  grief  he  now  feels. 
He  desired  me  to  counsel  him  as  to  the  form  in 
certain  lines,  and  the  use  of  particular  words; 
some  of  these,  at  his  suggestion  or  mine,  were 
changed.  He  spoke  touchingly  and  with  discrimi 
nation  of  May;  saying  that  he  felt  her  loss  more 
than  that  of  his  wife  two  years  before.  'There  was 

[113] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
an  earthly  future  for  May,  with  her  child,  but 
none  for  Mrs.  Alcott  at  her  age'  (seventy-seven). 
As  I  was  making  for  him  a  copy  of  the  poem, 
with  the  changes,  Mr.  Emerson,  who  had  called 
at  Mr.  Alcott's  house  near  by,  to  sympathize  with 
him  in  his  bereavement,  finding  he  was  with  me, 
came  over,  and  they  had  a  long  conversation  by 
themselves. 

"  It  was  now  five  o'clock  and  more,  and,  after 
some  urging,  he  stayed  to  tea,  and  with  him  his 
daughter  Ellen,  who  had  called  to  escort  him 
home,  at  the  other  end  of  the  village.  Mr.  Alcott 
also  stayed,  and  the  conversation  soon  became 
general,  and  reminiscent,  as  it  often  is  with  Emer 
son  of  late  years.  He  said  that  a  classmate  of  his 
brother  William,  John  Everett,  a  younger  bro 
ther  of  Edward  and  Alexander  Everett,  was  a 
superior  person,  with  as  much  genius  as  Edward, 
and  of  a  more  imposing  appearance.  He  was  noted 
in  College,  as  Edward  had  been,  for  eloquence  in 
declamation,  'and  I  remember  exactly  how  he 
uttered  Byron's  lines  in  Childe  Harold,  which  we 
all  knew  by  heart  then:  — 

[114] 


EMERSON 

"Three  hosts  combine  to  offer  sacrifice, 
Three  tongues  prefer  strange  orisons  on  high, 
Three  gaudy  standards  flout  the  pale  blue  skies ; 
The  shouts  are  France !  Spain !  Albion  !  Victory ! 
The  foe,  the  victim,  and  the  fond  ally,"  etc. 

When  Byron  had  nothing  to  say,  which  was 
often,  he  yet  said  it  magnificently.  John  Ever 
ett's  address  to  his  classmates,  on  graduating, 
was  printed  at  the  time,  and  is  a  very  good  piece 
of  writing.  Edward  Hale,  his  nephew,  has  lately 
sent  me  a  copy,  and  I  read  it,  after  many  years, 
with  new  pleasure.  He  became  a  tutor  in  the 
Transylvania  University  in  Kentucky;  but  in  a 
visit  to  Boston  in  1826,  after  speaking  eloquently 
in  Faneuil  Hall,  he  went  home  to  a  house  where 
Miss  Ellen  Tucker  was  then  living,  and  she  heard 
him  fall  dead  in  a  room  over  hers. 

" '  William  Emerson,  after  graduating  and  teach 
ing  a  school  in  Boston,  went  to  Germany  to  com 
plete  his  studies  for  the  ministry;  but  had  his 
opinions  so  much  modified  by  what  he  learned 
there  that  he  had  doubts  of  his  fitness  for  the 
pulpit.  He  went  to  see  Goethe  at  Weimar,  to 
ask  his  advice  about  preaching,  and  the  old  poet 

[ 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
urged  him  to  conform  to  custom  and  preach  in 
spite  of  his  doubts.  My  brother  could  not  do 
that;  he  returned  to  Boston  and  came  to  see  me 
in  Chelmsford,  where  I  had  a  school, — telling  me 
that  "he  could  not  be  a  minister."  I  was  very  sad, 
for  I  knew  how  much  it  would  grieve  my  mother, 
as  it  did.  We  were  all  ministers  for  generations. 
She  was  a  lady  of  the  old  stock,  my  mother, — 
had  been  a  member  of  Doctor  Gardiner's  Epis 
copal  Church  in  Boston,  and  was  converted  to 
Unitarianism  by  her  husband,  my  father.  Aunt 
Mary  Emerson  was  a  genius  and  a  great  writer. 

"'Afterwards,  when  I  was  studying  for  the 
ministry  at  Divinity  Hall  in  Cambridge,  Profes 
sor  Andrews  Norton  was  lecturing  there ;  and  he 
allowed  me,  who  for  a  year  could  use  my  eyes 
but  little,  to  hear  the  lectures  without  being  ex 
amined  on  the  subjects.  If  they  had  examined 
me,  they  would  perhaps  not  have  let  me  preach 
at  all.  Professor  Norton  was  then  a  scholastic  per 
son,  who  had  the  air  of  living  among  his  books  at 
Shady  Hill,  near  the  College;  he  was  not  a  man 
of  society,  as  I  think.  Edward  Everett,  a  younger 

[116] 


EMERSON 

scholar,  who  had  studied  in  Germany,  was  ad 
mired  by  all  the  young  men  when  he  taught 
Greek  at  Cambridge;  we  were  sorry  when  he 
went  into  political  life,  and  was  sent  to  Congress, 
for  which  he  was  not  fitted.  Alexander  Everett 
seemed  to  me  a  heavy  person;  his  brothers  had 
genius,  but  he  had  only  talent.'" 

At  this  date,  little  more  than  two  years  before 
his  death,  Emerson  seldom  took  part  any  longer 
in  public  conversations,  being  distrustful  of  his 
memory;  which,  however,  was  good  for  remote 
events,  such  as  those  above  mentioned.  He  often 
spoke  of  his  college  days,  and  on  one  occasion 
related  to  Elizabeth  Peabody,  in  the  presence  of 
his  brother  Charles,  an  incident  of  his  intercourse 
with  the  professor  of  rhetoric,  Edward  Channing, 
a  brother  of  the  preacher,  who  had  a  great  name 
for  improving  the  style  of  his  pupils.  Emerson 
had  written  a  poem  for  a  college  exhibition,  and, 
being  required  to  submit  it  to  Professor  Chan 
ning,  got  only  this  remark  by  way  of  criticism,  — 
"You  had  better  write  another  poem."  "What 
a  useless  remark  that  was!"  said  Emerson;  "he 

[117] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
might  have  pointed  out  to  me  some  things  in  my 
work  that  were  better  than  others,  for  all  could 
not  have  been  equally  bad."  Charles  Emerson  said, 
"He  did  not  treat  me  so  unhandsomely ;  for  when 
I  took  him  a  prose  exercise  once,  he  said  to  me, 
'Emerson,  if  Burke  had  wished  to  express  such  a 
thought  as  yours,  he  would  have  written  so-and- 
so.'"  "That  was  much  better,"  said  Waldo  Emer 
son,  "for  the  very  name  of  Burke  is  inspiring;  and 
what  you  had  written  could  not  have  been  wholly 
worthless,  if  it  suggested  any  comparison  with 
Burke."  He  was  sure  he  had  got  little  instruction 

or  criticism  from  his  professors  that  was  of  value, 

/ 

but  he  ascribed  much  to  the  stimulus  and  ex- 
ample  given  by  his  Aunt  Mary.  A  friend  once 
asked  him,  "What  would  have  happened  in  the 
development  of  your  mind  if  you  had  been  born 
and  grown  up  in  the  small  town  of  Harvard, 
where  your  father  was  first  settled  as  parish  min 
ister?"  "That  circumstance  would  have  made 
little  difference;  Nature  and  books  would  have 
been  with  me."  "But  what  if  your  Aunt  Mary 
had  not  taken  part  in  your  training?"  "Ah,  that 

[118] 


EMERSON 

would  have  been  a  loss !  she  was  as  great  an  ele 
ment  in  my  life  as  Greece  or  Rome."  He  told  me 
once  that  she  was  never  fairly  just  to  her  step 
father,  Doctor  Ripley,  because  he  could  not  write 
well, — being  so  good  a  writer  herself. 

Emerson  had  preserved  the  only  mention  I 
ever  heard  of  a  college  duel  fought  by  his  uncle, 
Daniel  Bliss  Ripley,  the  doctor's  younger  son, 
which  caused  his  expulsion  from  Harvard,  and 
his  withdrawal  to  Alabama,  where,  at  a  town 
called  Saint  Stephens,  he  lived  and  died,  without 
returning  to  his  native  land.  "I  once  saw  a  letter," 
said  Emerson,  "from  my  father,  William  Emer 
son,  to  George  Cabot,  the  senator,  and  friend  of 
Washington,  asking  him  to  interpose  and  pre 
vent  the  duel  between  his  half-brother,  Ripley, 
and  young  X.  But  it  was  impossible  to  prevent 
the  meeting;  they  fired  one  shot  each,  and  the 
consequence  fell  heavily  on  my  grandfather."3 
He  added  that  he  had  once  dined  at  Waltham 
with  Governor  Gore,  a  "great  gentleman,"  and 
Doctor  Ripley 's  classmate. 

I  have  thus  given  many  samples  of  Emerson's 
[  119  ] 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 
table-talk,  and  will  only  add  here  those  which 
Ellery  Channing  noted  down: — 

Foreign  Travel. 

"It  is  the  American  malady, — lues  Americana; 
it  is  the  cholera.  I  have  been  visiting  in  the  coun 
try,  as  I  thought, — and  behold,  a  lady,  a  profes 
sor's  wife  in  a  little  college,  began  to  talk  to 
me  about  the  Bernese  Alps!  The  Americans  are 
wretched,  go  where  they  will.  George  Bradford 
was  miserable  in  Europe;  he  had  left  Rome  and 
gone  to  Paris  without  a  reason,  save  that  others 
were  going;  and  now  he  wished  to  go  back.  I 
do  not  know  that  he  should  have  gone  even  to 
Rome ;  that  is  something  exceptional.  Paris  does 
not  seem  good  till  you  have  left  it." 

George  Sand. 

"I    have   already   lost    her.    According   to    my 

comprehension,  good  taste  does  not  consist  in 

magnifying  the  little,  as  she  does,  but  in  the 

selection  of  good  things  that  can  be  properly 

magnified." 

[  120  ] 


EMERSON 
Burns. 

"I  was  greatly  surprised  at  the  applause  that 
greeted  my  speech  at  the  Burns  dinner  in  Boston 
the  other  day.  Not  having  had  a  very  good  opin 
ion  of  this  Scottish  songster,  I  renewed  my  ac 
quaintance  with  him  by  a  fresh  reading,  and  to  a 
better  purpose.  But  I  had  only  a  few  moments 
to  prepare  myself  for  speaking." 

Tennyson. 

"Walking  out  in  the  autumnal  woods  this  after 
noon  with  George  Bradford,  he  thought  that  all 
Maud  was  filled  with  descriptions  of  these  golden 
colors ;  but  when  he  looked  in  the  book  he  found 
only  these  two  lines, 

' And  out  he  walked  when  the  wind  like  a  broken  worldling  wailed, 
And  the  flying  gold  of  the  ruined  woodlands  drove  thro'  the  air.' 

Tennyson  has  not  the  fulness  of  Wordsworth. 
Milton  would  have  hardly  lifted  his  eyelids  to  see 
such  things  as  Maud.  Yet  these  Idylls  of  his  show 
that  the  Ideal  may  still  be  built  in  England." 

Reading. 

"I   like  reading  as  well  as  ever  I   did  in   my 

youth.  That  is  one  thing  that  has  lost  no  charm 


THE     PERSONALITY     OF 
for  me.  Give  me  my  book  and  candle,  and  I  am 
alone  with  the  universe." 

Writing 

(Said  of  a  course  of  Lectures  repeated). 
"All  I  have  learned  of  writing  is  to  scratch  out 
a  little.  I  have  learned  to  omit  the  word  'very.' 
These  published  discourses  of  mine  do  not  read 
as  they  did  when  they  were  delivered,  so  many 
years  ago, — fourteen  years,  is  it?  Yes,  I  have  that 
vanity  of  Doctor  Ripley,  who  used  without  fail 
to  read  his  sermons  over  to  the  family  after  the 
service  in  the  afternoon.  And  so  I  repeat  my  old 
discourses." 

Future  Life. 

"I  think  well  of  Goethe's  saying, — that  if  Na 
ture  has  given  us  these  faculties,  and  I  have  em 
ployed  mine  well,  and  faithfully  to  the  end,  she 
is  bound  still  further  to  explain  the  questions 
which  they  put." 

Of  a  Little  Lady. 

"She  is  such  a  perfect  little  Serenity!  'Her  Se 
rene  Lowness,'  we  might  call  her." 


EMERSON 

Parker  Pillsbury,  the  Abolitionist  Orator. 
"He  lives  in  the  other  Concord,  our  New  Hamp 
shire  namesake,  and  has  much  of  the  New  Hamp 
shire  vigor  about  him.  He  talks  well  in  his  chair, 
but  does  not  read  as  well  from  his  paper." 

Richard  Cobden. 

"I  dined  with  Mr.  Cobden  at  John  Forbes's  in 
Milton  the  other  day,  but  he  did  not  speak  much 
directly.  I  saw  he  had  the  true  English  feeling, 
and  was  talking  aside  about  his  six  per  cents.  He 
spoke  interrogatively,  and  I  thought  was  grow 
ing  seedy.  I  asked  him  why  he  did  not  let  us 
make  an  occasion  for  him  to  speak ;  but  he  said 
when  he  came  over  it  was  to  keep  his  ears  open 
and  his  mouth  shut."4 

Nirvana. 

"Different  persons  among  the  Buddhists  take 
their  special  views  of  the  meaning  of  the  doctrine 
of  Nirvana.  They  have  their  Kants  and  Hegels, 
of  course,  who  make  each  his  own  interpretation." 

Sickness. 

"James   Burke,   my   man,   when   he  is   sick  is 

[  123  ] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
spleeny.  He  thinks  he  shall  die,  that  he  cannot 
earn  half  his  wages,  must  go  to  his  sister, — and 
it  is  all  very  dreadful.  Strange  how  differently 
people  view  their  colics  and  belly-aches!  Some 
laugh  at  their  dumps,  and  see  the  joke,  as  they 
should.  Mrs.  A  and  Mrs.  B  really  believe  that 
they  are  ill;  and  I  have  no  doubt  it  is  true  for 
the  moment.  But  let  anything  occur  to  tempt 
Mrs.  B  out,  and  she  goes  at  once." 

Debt. 

"When  my  debts  begin  to  grow  clamorous  I 
think  I  must  take  some  means  of  satisfying  them. 
I  have  now  in  my  pocket  three  cents  and  a  coun 
terfeit  half-dollar." 

To  his  Publisher 

(On  being  paid  twice  for  the  same  Essay). 

"Mr.  Fields!  I  ought  not  to  take  this  money;  but 
I  was  a  thief  from  the  foundation  of  the  world." 

South  Carolina. 

,  "Think  of  a  country  where  there  is  but  one 
opinion !  where  there  is  no  minority.  Fisher  Ames 
was  right  in  saying  that  the  best  majority  was 


EMERSON 

where  there  was  but  one  over, — that  is,  where 
opinion  was  most  evenly  divided." 

This  remark  about  South  Carolina,  of  which  it 
used  to  be  said  that  "when  Calhoun  took  snuff, 
the  whole  State  sneezed,"  was  not  made  in  1844, 
at  the  time  of  Samuel  Hoar's  expulsion  from 
Charleston,  but  later,  in  connection  with  the  out 
break  of  the  Civil  War,  in  which,  from  first  to 
last,  Emerson  took  the  side  of  Union  and  Lib 
erty.  But  in  connection  with  Mr.  Hoar's  affair, 
a  characteristic  citation  may  be  given.  Ellery 
Channing,  writing  from  New  York  in  the  win 
ter  of  1844-45,  had  inquired  of  Emerson  if  the 
conduct  of  the  "old  Squire"  (as  he  was  called  in 
Concord)  had  been  quite  brave  enough  in  with 
drawing.  To  this  Emerson  gave  substantially  the 
same  reply  which  he  gave  to  Channing's  friend, 
S.  G.  Ward,  as  printed  in  the  little  volume,  Let 
ters  from  Emerson  to  a  Friend,  four  years  ago. 
He  said  (December  17,  1844):- 

"Mr.  Hoar  has  just  come  home  from  Carolina, 
and  gave  me  this  morning  a  narrative  of  his  visit. 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
He  has  behaved  admirably  well,  I  judge.  One  ex 
pression  struck  me,  which  he  said  he  regretted  a 
little,  afterwards,  as  it  might  sound  a  little  vapor 
ing.  A  gentleman  who  was  very  much  his  friend 
called  him  into  a  private  room  to  say  that  the 
danger  from  the  populace  had  increased  so  much 
that  he  must  now  insist  on  Mr.  Hoar's  leaving 
the  city  at  once;  and  he  showed  him  where  he 
might  procure  a  carriage,  and  where  he  might 
safely  stop  on  the  way  to  his  plantation,  which  he 
would  reach  the  next  morning.  Mr.  Hoar  thanked 
him,  but  told  him  again  that  he  could  not  and 
would  not  go, — and  that  he  had  rather  his  broken 
skull  should  be  carried  to  Massachusetts  by  some 
body  else,  than  to  carry  it  home  safe  himself 
whilst  his  duty  required  him  to  remain.  He  did 
not  consent  to  depart,  but  in  every  instance  re 
fused, — to  the  sheriff,  and  acting  mayor,  to  his 
friends,  and  to  the  Committee  of  the  South  Caro 
lina  Association, — and  only  went  when  they  came 
in  crowds  with  carriages  to  conduct  him  to  the 
boat,  and  go  he  must.  Then  he  got  into  the  coach 
himself,  not  thinking  it  proper  to  be  dragged." 

[126] 


EMERSON 

It  must  be  remembered  that  this  venerable 
gentleman  was  in  Charleston  as  the  envoy  of 
Massachusetts,  to  protest  against  the  imprison 
ment  of  her  free  colored  seamen,  while  their  ves 
sel  lay  in  port, — so  fearful  were  the  proud  gentry 
of  that  State  lest  the  contagion  of  liberty  might 
be  communicated  to  their  slaves.  Poetic  justice 
required  that  the  insult  to  Massachusetts,  and  to 
Kansas  in  1856,  should  be  requited  in  less  than 
twenty  years  by  the  presence  in  South  Carolina 
of  Colonel  Higginson's  black  regiment,  recruited 
from  slaves,  and  of  Colonel  Montgomery's  sol 
diers,  also  recruited  from  slaves.  Emerson  viewed 
this  recompense  with  satisfaction;  and  when,  a 
few  years  earlier,  I  had  carried  Captain  Mont 
gomery,  then  a  Kansas  partisan  leader,  to  his 
house,  he  received  the  gallant  descendant  of  the 
Scotch  Montgomeries,  bearing  himself  like  a 
French  Chevalier,  with  much  hospitality. 

Hospitality,  in  the  usual  sense,  and  also  in  the 
broader  meaning  of  liberality  of  soul  toward 
other  men's  thought,  was  a  distinguishing  trait 
of  Emerson.  Though  far  from  wealthy,  and  at 

[127] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF 
times  much  narrowed  in  his  income  by  bad  in 
vestments,  his  house  was  open  to  more  guests 
than  any  other  in  Concord,  and  he  also  enter 
tained  his  visitors  from  a  distance  very  often  in 
Boston.  In  his  earlier  acquaintance  with  Walt 
Whitman,  he  desired  to  bring  him  to  Concord, 
in  the  spring  of  1860,  when  Whitman  was  in 
Boston,  printing  a  new  edition  of  his  Leaves  of 
Grass;  and  Alcott  and  Henry  Thoreau  had  the 
same  wish,  to  invite  him  to  their  houses.  But 
it  was  found  that  Mrs.  Emerson,  Mrs.  Alcott, 
and  Sophia  Thoreau  were  so  prejudiced  against 
Whitman  by  some  things  in  his  book,  that  they 
would  not  join  in  the  invitation.  Twenty-one 
years  later,  in  September,  1881,  when  Whitman 
did  make  his  only  visit  to  Concord,  as  my  guest, 
Mrs.  Alcott  and  Miss  Thoreau  were  dead,  but 
Mrs.  Emerson  came  with  her  husband  to  an 
evening  conversation  at  my  house,  and  cordially 
invited  him  to  dine  with  her  the  next  day,  as  he 
did;  and  Louisa  Alcott,  who  had  much  admira 
tion  for  Whitman,  came  with  her  father,  and 
bore  her  part  in  the  colloquy.  Whitman  has  de- 

[128] 


EMERSON 

scribed  this  visit  in  one  of  his  books ;  it  occurred 
but  a  few  months  before  Emerson's  death.  Emer 
son  had  told  me,  long  before,  that  when  he  pro 
posed  to  Doctor  Holmes  and  Mr.  Longfellow  to 
invite  Whitman  to  one  of  the  monthly  dinners 
of  the  Boston  Saturday  Club,  of  which  all  three 
were  members,  neither  of  these  poets  manifested 
any  wish  to  meet  Whitman,  and  he  was  not  in 
vited. 

I  have  dwelt,  in  this  book,  chiefly  on  personal 
traits  and  events  well  known  to  me,  in  the  life  of 
this  great  man,  leaving  them  to  bear  their  own 
testimony  to  his  character.  Fitly  to  delineate  that, 
on  the  broader  canvas  of  a  biography,  though  I 
should  wish  to  do  so,  would  be  beyond  my  powers, 
as  it  has  proved  to  be  with  most  who  have  at 
tempted  it.  No  adequate  memoir  (though  several 
excellent  sketches  have  appeared)  preserves  for 
those  who  knew  him,  or  for  those  who  read  him 
thoughtfully,  his  remarkable  traits  in  their  com 
pleteness;  while  many  writers  have  misconceived 
him  greatly.  Time  is  needed,  even  the  distance  of 
a  century,  to  show  his  colossal  portraiture  in  due 

[  129  ] 


THE  PERSONALITY  OF  EMERSON 
perspective.  One  quality  in  him  impressed  all  who 
met  him :  his  freedom  from  the  common  defects. 
Henry  James,  Senior,  with  his  theologic  vocabu 
lary,  called  him  "the  unfallen  man,"  and  Alcott, 
with  others,  used  the  same  figure  of  speech.  My 
dear  friend  Ednah  Cheney,  writing  to  Ariana 
Walker  in  1852,  after  hearing  him  in  Boston, 
said:  "Emerson's  lectures  are  finished.  He  never 
was  higher  or  nobler;  never  so  clear,  humane, 
and  practical.  He  looks  like  an  angel  fresh  from 
Paradise,  and  speaks  as  if  he  had  never  been 
at  the  Tower  of  Babel,  but  had  retained  his  first 
heavenly  accents."  This  youthful  estimate  has  a 
touch  of  Concord  hyperbole,  but  goes  to  the  root 
of  the  matter.  He  had  something  in  his  mind 
and  heart  which  could  so  be  described.  I  must 
say,  as  did  Sir  Robert  Harley's  chaplain  of  that 
grand  Englishman:  "My  language  is  not  a  match 
for  his  excellent  virtues:  his  spiritual  lineaments 
and  beauties  are  above  my  pencil.  I  want  art  to 
draw  his  picture/' 


NOTES 


NOTES 

Note  1  (page  29). 

Like  Emerson's  own  character,,  which  had  surprising  contra 
dictions  in  it,  Mary  Emerson  could  be  differently  viewed  from 
diverse  standpoints.  A  relative  of  hers,  still  living,  who  spent 
some  time  with  Doctor  Ripley  in  the  Old  Manse,  was  about 
to  leave  Concord,  and  her  aged  kinsman  thus  addressed  her: 
"I  will  give  you  a  short  lecture,  my  dear.  In  your  future  course 
of  life,  remember  to  follow  Duty  rather  than  Inclination;  a 
good  rule,  of  which  your  Aunt  Mary  has  always  held  the  op 
posite."  She  certainly  believed  that  she  did  her  whole  duty, 
however  disagreeable  it  was  to  others.  At  her  death  in  May, 
1863,  in  her  ninetieth  year,  I  wrote  of  her  in  the  Boston  Com 
monwealth  (to  which  Alcott,  Channing,  Thoreau,  posthumously, 
and  Emerson  contributed  —  the  last  sparingly):  "Her  con 
versation  was  a  singular  melange  of  sincere  devotion,  worldly 
wisdom,  wit,  and  anecdote;  and  she  was  thought  to  have  the 
power  of  saying  more  disagreeable  things  in  a  half-hour  than 
any  person  living.  Reproof  was  her  mission,  she  thought,  and 
she  fulfilled  it  unsparingly.  But  she  knew  how  to  be  tolerant, 
was  a  great  humorist,  and  loved  to  meet  forcible  persons  who 
would  not  agree  with  her."  A  kinswoman  thought  a  young 
editor  ought  not  to  have  told  so  much  truth  of  the  deceased, 
and  complained  to  Emerson,  who  read  the  paragraph,  and 
merely  said  (as  was  reported  to  me  by  another  niece),  "I  see 
that  he  was  well  acquainted  with  Aunt  Mary." 

Note  2  (page  97). 

This  was  said  in  1878;  but  in  1880  he  did  not  remember  hav 
ing  read  it  at  all. 

[133] 


NOTES 

Note  3  (page  119). 

The  portrait  of  this  handsome  young  duellist  has  long  hung 

in  the  hall  at  the  Old  Manse. 


Note  4  (page 

Emerson  had  heard  Mr.  Cobden  in  England  in  1847,  and  de 
scribed  the  speech  in  a  letter  to  Thoreau. 


A  LIMITED  EDITION  of  five  hundred  copies  of  this  book  was 
printed  on  French  hand-made  paper,  and  twenty-five  copies  on  Japan 
paper,  by  D.  B.  UPDIKE,  THE  MERHYMOUNT  PRESS,  BOSTON, 
in  March,  1903.  This  is  copy  N°- 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
BERKELEY 


RV 


Return  to  desk  from  which  borrowed. 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


MAR  ti     us** 
>7PVWan'6 

RE 

,1!\H  l'3  ' 

LIBRARY  USE 
APR  15  1961 


o 


REC'D  LD 

JAN    31962 


EC29'67-2PM 
KAN  2  5  1968 


RECEIVED 

MOV    5'68-£ 

LOAN  DEPT 

EP 12  ,975  5  2 


DEC  1 6  J979 


CIR.  DEC  1  4  1979 


AM95 


LD  21-100m-9,'47(A5702sl6)476 


210409 


